Victim of Circumstance
by Afrojack
Summary: [Post HBP]How long can any man fight the darkness before he finds it within himself? He walks on the edge of a blade between what is right and what is easy, between greatness and infamy, between sanity and losing everything, even himself, to the darkness.
1. Beyond All Others

**Disclaimer: I own nothing but some of the observations and the plot. J.K. Rowling owns my soul, thus I live to interpret her work feebly.**

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**Beyond All Others**

The moon was playing softly against the black sky, casting lengthy shadows across the ground, drifting calmly as if nothing extraordinary had happened that night. Nothing stirred but a small rabbit that was hopping disjointedly across the dirt pathways, ignorant and self-preserving. The rabbit flinched and scurried away as two figures appeared with a deafening _CRACK! _The shorter of the two wrenched his arm out of the taller man's grasp and began to walk haughtily towards a large building on the far side of the hill. The tall man with limp, shoulder-length hair reached out and yanked the other figure backwards with a hiss of annoyance.

"Back fool! We have to hide your mother," Snape said looking around nervously, "We have leeway because of Dumbledore's death, but your mother does not. She must hide if she wishes to survive."

"What?" Draco yelped. "Why?"

"Because," Snape sneered, looking down his nose at his reckless charge, "She disobeyed a direct order from the Dark Lord to hold her tongue regarding your duty."

"Why in the bloody hell," seethed Draco, wondering at his mother's stupidity, "would she do something that idiotic?"

"Because she had no faith in you and your abilities," Snape explained as if talking to a stubborn child. "Though you are correct, it was an extremely stupid action to take."

"Don't insult my mother!" Draco snapped, turning scarlet and glaring daggers at his professor. Snape was silently musing at the hypocrisy of teenagers when he responded.

"Well," Snape reasoned, pausing as if for dramatic effect, "you said it yourself. She acted foolishly and must now… reap her _rewards._"

"This is your fault!" Draco accused, pointing a finger in Snape's face. "Why'd you go and make an unbreakable vow? You idiot."

"Do not _ever_," Snape said furiously, "assume that you are my equal, it will be the last mistake you shall ever make! Just because you no longer attend Hogwarts does not mean you forget to respect your elders, most especially _me_. And," continued Snape, interrupting Draco before he could utter a word, "your mother would be in trouble with the Dark Lord whether I had accepted the vow or not. She is still guilty of treachery."

"_If_," Draco hissed, with shaking fists, "you are done having a go at my mum—"

"Don't you see?" Snape asked him exasperatedly. "She has made things undeniably harder for you, and you know exactly why she must hide, and know perfectly well that the blame does not lie with me!"

"I see no reason why she is in trouble in the first place," argued Draco, "And neither do I see how she made things harder for me at any point!"

"The Dark Lord threatened you with the death of your family, correct?" Snape asked, extremely annoyed now.

"Yes," Draco answered off-handedly. "Your point is..?"

"By doing what she did," Snape explained slowly, "she has ensured her death with or without your success. She effectively made any effort of yours a complete _waste._"

Draco opened his mouth to retort, but simply closed it and proceeded to stalk determinedly towards his mansion. He opened the door and Snape followed silently, preparing himself for what he was about to do. He walked through the halls, following the sound of indecipherable yelling towards where Draco was apparently shouting down his mother, who was backing away with an utterly ashamed look on her face. He stopped a few paces away and waited for Draco to finish his shouting, and then stepped forward.

"You realize the situation?" Snape asked.

"Yes," she answered shakily. "Where should I go?"

"I can give you," he answered silkily, "no definite answer to that question. As you very well know, Draco and I will undoubtedly receive new tasks, and will have to devote our full time to them. I can only offer you my home. It is well warded and has many hiding places should you look hard enough to find them."

She nodded and looked tearfully at Draco, throwing her arms around him and hugging him tightly. Snape nodded to her and spun on his heel, heading towards the doorway and out into the night. Draco followed shortly thereafter, and together they walked silently through the gates and Apparated away to the Headquarters of Voldemort and the other Death Eaters with no other obligations. They immediately hurried into a house that appeared out of thin air and began to walk through a maze of hallways. As they reached the door to the Dark Lord's chambers, the aggressive teen made to storm in heedlessly and without pretense.

"Get back here, you idiot!" Snape ordered as he closed his fingers around the arm of his charge.

He continued in the same voice, though slightly hasty now. "If either one of us goes in, we are dead! Separately we have each made a gargantuan mistake."

"I wouldn't have if you hadn't interfered like I told you not to!" hissed Malfoy with almost reckless venom in his voice. "I was seconds away from completing the mission!"

"Do not," Snape hissed, "try to tell me that you were about to finish him! That lie will be your death if you speak it to the Dark Lord, you imbecile!"

"Now," he continued, "If we go in together, we have completed a mission he has been working on for almost three decades, and we can work that to our advantage."

The teen threw him a filthy look but complied nonetheless and followed the man into a relatively large room. As they entered, they found their master to be sitting contentedly with his fingertips together in a fashion reminiscent of one, now late, Albus Dumbledore.

"Ah, Severus _and_ Draco," he hissed in an almost caressing tone. "What a pleasant surprise."

"What news do you bring me?" Voldemort inquired in an interested sneer. "Hopefully news… of a certain wizard's untimely death."

"We do bring such news, Master," Snape said in a silky whisper. "He is indeed no longer among us."

"Tell me the story," Voldemort said, pleasure in his voice as he relished in his newest victory. "I want to hear the details of the Muggle-loving fool's death."

Snape related the entire night back to Voldemort, hesitating on Draco's failure to finish the job but telling the truth anyway. He hoped with all of his heart that his hunch from the year before had been right, and voiced this at the end of his tale.

"I know that you ordered Draco to do it, My Lord," he began emotionlessly, showing no vulnerable sentiment to his cruel master, "but I had the impression that you intended me to finalize the act when you told me the plan last year."

Voldemort stared impassively at them for what felt like hours rather than seconds. When he spoke, it was in a tone of reluctant mercy, yet it still held the pleased, gloating inflection from the initial news of Dumbledore's death.

"I am disappointed in your reluctance to take the killing blow, Draco," he told the teen. "However, I will admit that I tasked you with his death to punish your father, and despite that, you managed to kill Dumbledore without ever uttering anything but a few repairing spells. That is a valuable kind of talent, and you shall be rewarded, I assure you."

"You, Severus," he said tuning his head to the older man, "were able to step forward in Draco's moment of weakness and pull the trigger. You too shall be rewarded for your actions, as indeed, I did intend for you to do it… in the very end."

He leaned back in his throne-like chair and surveyed them closely, as though measuring his next words carefully. He leaned forward again and, after a few minutes, spoke in a tone of utmost finality.

"If this had been anybody but Albus Dumbledore," Voldemort whispered in a deadly hiss, "you would both be _dead_! I cannot allow this any further. Severus, I want him trained and ready to step into service by summer's end. His talents for keeping his hands clean like his father cannot be his only asset. Even Lucius knew when to buckle down and fight."

"I'm sorry master," Draco spoke for the first time since entering the room. "My hesitation is inexcusable. I beg forgiveness in the hope that Dumbledore's death will appease you."

"Then I suggest," Voldemort hissed, "that you do not fail me on the task I am about to set you and Severus, going by the principle that you two seem destined to work together." He leaned back and Draco sighed in deep relief.

Still looking at them he reached over to the table next to his chair and grabbed a stack of papers. Both Snape and the young Malfoy smirked a little at the Dark Lord's organization methods. If the question wouldn't have invited Voldemort annihilate them, they would have perhaps asked him if he had misplaced his reading spectacles, but they valued their lives and so remained silent. Voldemort flipped through countless pages and finally pulled one out and looked up at his servants.

"I would further suggest that you never speak unless spoken to again, young Malfoy. You will regret doing so, and I'm sure Severus can teach you the penalty for doing so, and the one for _smirking, YOU IMPUDENT WHELP!" _Voldemort flicked his fingers and before Draco could react, Snape had taken action.

"_CRUCIO!" _roared Snape, smirking in glee at Draco's humiliation and agony. "Let this be your first lesson of the summer. That is not Dumbledore, and this is not Potions class," he intoned over Draco's pitiful whimpers, stalking closer and closer to the young charge. "You will know this pain and a hundred times worse, should our lord deem you worthy enough to punish you himself if you do not learn." The screams grew louder as Snape grew closer, until his wand was almost touching the child writhing on the floor. "It is time you learned, learned that those with greater power than you, will hurt you, no matter your influence." And then the wand made contact with Draco's chest, and the teenager was taken over by convulsions.

"Enough!" Voldemort yelled from his chair. "He will learn, or he will be punished. By me." He looked at the quivering mass of flesh on the floor.

"I want you to find Harry Potter, tell me what he is doing," he said staring intently at them both, "I thought you in particular would enjoy this job, young Malfoy. You are to start after his birthday, as he will be of age and no doubt roaming about like the idiot that he is. That is all, be gone."

Malfoy slowly dragged himself up, and with one last fearful look at his new master, he and Snape bowed low and exited the room briskly. Snape was cursing quietly beside him. Draco looked over at his former professor in confusion and wondered why he was displeased by their assignment, seeing as Snape hated Potter just as much as he did himself, if not more so, but shrugged it off. He was in too much pain to do much of anything at this point.

- - - - -

And so they waited. They waited until that fool's birthday came, waiting for their hunt to commence. They lived at the Dark Lord's headquarters while Severus taught Draco everything he knew, focusing his strengths and teaching him spells he would never learn in Hogwarts. Draco in particular was eager to humiliate and hunt down his rival, and perhaps temporarily forget about his mother's absence, and it showed as he excelled in everything he was learning. Draco trained harder than he ever had, spurned on by the chance that if he worked hard enough, he might stand a chance against Potter. Having never bested him in any kind of serious fight, Draco scowled at the memory of being put in the Hospital Wing by that fool last year. Snape used this to his advantage, motivating Draco to master each new spell and incantation, mocking him for losing to his unworthy nemesis. However, every time Draco mentioned the assignment to Snape, his teacher would grow tense and withdraw, seemingly frustrated by what he constantly deemed, 'a near impossible mission.'

"What's wrong, Professor?" Draco asked, confused by his mentor's behavior on one such occasion. "I would have thought that you especially would relish this assignment. From what I've heard, you gave Potter a sound beating when he tried to fight you at Hogwarts."

"My doubt is not whether I will be able to grab the idiot," Snape clarified, "but whether I will be able to find him."

"Well," reasoned Draco, "you were spying on the Order. I'm sure you've heard enough about the places he _might_ stay, and you have access to all of them. You taught him for six years, so you would know where he _would _stay."

"The thing that bothers me most," Snape began, an odd pitch marring his usually apathetic tone, "is that I have an idea of _exactly_ where he will go, and I already know that I can't get in."

Yet as Snape said this, he realized through his stupor just how much this generation of students he had taught from first-year had grown, and how much they still had to develop. His favorite student, sitting before him, had progressed from an arrogant, imbecilic brat to a cool and calculating, though still arrogant young man. As if sensing Snape's mentor moment, Draco showed just how much he had matured, especially in the last year.

"If we can't get in," Draco whispered in a malevolent tone, looking Snape in the eye, "we have to draw them out, don't we?"

As July 31st drew ever closer, Snape and Malfoy could be seen hunched over the small table in Snape's sitting room, planning how best to seize their target quickly and efficiently. There were crumpled bits of parchment and thick leather-bound tomes everywhere. Possible places, times and dates and supplies were pinned to small board on the wall, yet no definite details were laid down. Snape had scribbled something down quickly, only to screw up the whole page, toss it into the air and obliterate it before it reached the floor. Snape sighed and ran his long fingers through his greasy locks and flumped back into his chair. He and Draco had been planning for almost a month; Potter's birthday was next week, and still they were no closer to a definite plan on how to snag him. Dumbledore had mentioned once in passing that Harry would cease to be protected by his Aunt's blood on his 17th birthday, but had not said where the whelp lived. He rubbed his temples as he realized that that would give Potter time to flee to better protection. Well, he thought to himself, while they figured out a plan to capture Potter, they could go to the place he would undeniably be and still gather information.

"I honestly don't know," Draco sighed, looking at a piece of rumpled paper in his hand. "He'll be too smart to fall for an attack on Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, and Hogwarts will probably be impenetrable by the time this plan is ready to go. I don't see this happening."

"There is one place," Snape drawled, coming upon a new stroke of brilliance. "One place that he would rush to protect in an instant."

"And where would that be?" Draco asked in a manner that conveyed his annoyance at being kept in the dark.

"That," Snape sneered with glee, "would unmistakably be, _The Burrow._"

Draco's face split with a maniacal grin that twisted his features in a rather nasty way, much like when the Dark Lord tried to smile. It seemed that the possibility of making the Weasleys suffer on top of Potter was almost too good.

"When?" asked Draco, unable to keep the sickening happiness out of his soft tenor.

"I think," Snape whispered menacingly, "that we should remind him of that fateful Halloween so long ago."

Draco laughed while Snape smirked nastily, and they renewed their planning, writing furiously gruesome and horrific tactics with which to attack the Burrow. Halloween would not be a good day for Harry Potter. It would be even worse for the Weasleys.

As they schemed, Harry Potter sat at his desk, mourning a lost teacher, flipping through the pages of a Charms book distractedly, and preparing himself to fight a battle that would test him to the core. He glanced up and gazed into his reflection, staring back into the eyes of a man who knew he was doomed. They were eyes that were dull, and hopeless, but under all that, as a testament to Harry's character and strength, there was a fervent, almost manic gleam, one that promised his departure would be an event to remember. Yes, thought Harry, he would go down in flames, and his enemies would burn with him in the fires of his last breath. With that, he dove back into his book, drowning his sorrows and doubts in his own deadly resolve, a resolve that resonated within him, spurring him to victory, soothing his wounds, and promising a possible life after this war.

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**Thank you for reading**

**Afrojack**


	2. Out of the Frying Pan

**Disclaimer: I own nothing but some of the observations and the plot. J.K. Rowling owns my soul, thus I live to interpret her work feebly.**

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**Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire**

At 11:30 P.M. on July 30th, very few occupants of Privet Drive, Little Whinging remained awake. Those that did were barely so, staring aimlessly at televisions, getting ready for bed, or bedtime reading in an attempt to fall asleep. Harry Potter, however, had never been more alert. He sat, resolute and unflinching, lost in a vortex of thoughts, wondering how on God's green earth he would proceed to complete a mission that was sure to be the undoing of him. His frantic and borderline delirious whispers to himself filled the prison-like space he occupied.

"How?" he asked himself. For surely, he had nowhere near the experience, power or knowledge to destroy Lord Voldemort, should he attempt his duty. "I haven't even finished school!" he whispered furiously, as though determined to find a reason to write himself off before he started.

Harry knew that he couldn't finish school though. He knew it because Dumbledore had given him a mission. Harry clearly remembered emphasizing his lack of magical prowess to the Headmaster, but what came next was almost like a beacon of hope for him. Professor Dumbledore had left a letter for Harry, wherein he gave him guidance and a clue as to how to beat Voldemort.

_"Harry,"_ here the letter had a pause, as though its author had been searching for the right words, "_magic…is different for every wizard who uses it. I know that seems a very frail explanation, but, it is hard to define. Each and every wizard who chooses to use magic must wield it, and not be used by it or others' opinions of it. Lastly, Harry, do not let yourself be governed by archaic languages. Remember the days of your youth when magic was only emotion and intent. So many wizards forget those days and become hopelessly dependent on the incantations and spells of languages they never learn to speak._

Harry had pondered this thoroughly everyday since his return to Number 4. Dumbledore had mentioned very obscure things like basic forms of magic, and the difference in the way each wizard or witch used magic. Harry was therefore reluctant to breech the subject in his thoughts once more, still feeling raw and strangely numb, but decided that on the eve of his manhood he would try, spurned on by adulthood, to crack the code in his enigmatic professor's words.

"I must wield it, and not be used by it or the opinions of others…" he muttered to himself. Harry pondered this message and, at first, thought that perhaps it meant that he could not let his magic run away with him. However, another disjointed memory flitted across his vision.

"_Harry, it is our choices, far more than our abilities that define who we are." _Dumbledore's words drifted slowly, like a whisper in his head.

And suddenly it clicked. His ability was magic, but his choices mattered far more than that ability when using it. Every bit of magic within his power was just that: within his power. And it was his to use to its full capacity; there were no things about his magic that he could not see or use, because it was his.

"Don't let yourself be ruled by archaic languages?" Harry mused.

He was stumped. That part of the letter had been fairly obvious; it meant that he was currently dependent on incantations to use his magic, but who wasn't? More memories started to come back to him. He cycled through his whole education again. McGonagall telling them that they needed to _envision_ the transfiguration, picturing the snake to force his Parsletongue, Lupin telling him he needed a happy memory to summon a Patronus, his admission to Hermione that he had been able to cast a fully fledged Patronus simply because he had already done it, him _willing _the beads back into Voldemort's wand, Bellatrix Lestrange telling him he needed to _enjoy _and intend causing pain, the way he had simply pointed and the jug of mead had refilled without effort because he knew he could. The things most necessary for performing those spells were not the incantation, but the intent to do so. _Emotion and Intent._

Harry had never thought to use magic in the way he had just been informed of, at least not any kind of serious magic, and so was limited to incantations in ancient languages. There was no spell for things as simple closing blinds or igniting lamps. Those things were as simple as a flick of the wand. Nonverbal casting? All a wizard had to ever do was know what he wanted. There was no secret; simply making his magic do whatever it was he anted.

Harry now remembered all those times when his eccentric headmaster had done seemingly impossible things with just a flick of the wand, or simpler things with a snap of his fingers or a wave of the hand. There was a slight problem in Harry's mind though. Would he be powerful enough to do that kind of magic without the help of spells? He would have to find out in seven minutes, he mused as he read the clock at 11:53, impressed at his long train of thoughts.

Harry waited on tenterhooks for midnight to arrive, feeling extremely jumpy, and erratically tired and then energized, as had been happening all day. He chalked it up to birthday nerves. A small question was nagging him though. Why was it that his begrudging protection ended tonight? Surely Dumbledore would have made it last as long as possible… unless there was something deeper. As Harry thought about it, it began to make more sense that magic itself recognized 17 as the coming of age and that any protection he might have had would be done away with.

As 11:56 came, Harry ceased to feel jumpy, but noticed that his skin was tingling, and he thought he could feel what was something oddly like every single part of his body going numb. It eventually stopped and Harry compared the feeling to that of a full, rechargeable battery. There was a flash outside and knew that his timed protection had ceased to exist.

Harry rose to his feet, pulled out his wand, and held his breath. This was it. He willed his trunk to be packed neatly, thought _pack_, and, in homage to his late professor, flicked his wand. The trunk in the center of his room began to immediately pack itself as if invisible house elves were racing to put his things away. It was small, and it wasn't much, but it gave Harry hope; Hope for that he might have a chance against the darkest wizard alive. He knew, though, that easy as it was to do non-verbal spells now that he knew the secret, he would still have to learn a lot, and learn each new spell the old way: movement, annunciation, and then he could do it silently. It was a tedious process, but necessary, and it comforted him that things like packing and lighting torches now required no such effort.

He broke himself from the silly euphoria of being a qualified wizard and started preparing to leave, knowing that Voldemort didn't know his location. He had a head start, but he could not squander it.

"Hedwig," he woke his pet, "start for the Weasleys'. I'll see you tomorrow." Hedwig cooed at him and vanished into the night.

Harry walked to his desk and picked up his letter from Ron.

_Harry,_

_The wedding is on August 2. Mum wants you here in the afternoon tomorrow. Mate, I thought it better that you know now than when you got here and it surprised you, but Ginny isn't happy with you, and Hermione and I think she's been sending letters to Dean Thomas again. You know teenage whims. They come and go. I think more than anything she feels inadequate, like she could have done more to keep you around. She's got this fixed image of a gallant knight and hero, but we all know that you hate that anyways. I'm sorry Harry, but just focus on what we have to do this year and I'm sure she'll come around. See you tomorrow!_

_Ron_

Harry sighed. He knew Ginny wouldn't have taken it well but had thought she might wait. He knew better though. In a strange way he felt freer than he had before. It had always felt like he was borrowing time from someone else's life, and now he recognized that he was really just living Ginny's fantasy, and that was hardly what he wanted for himself. It was a moot point now anyway because he had a job to do, but it wouldn't stop aching just because he was gallivanting across the country to destroy someone.

With his plan for tomorrow in mind, Harry made sure he had everything packed except his Hogwart's uniform, which he would be wearing as it was the best he had, and began to get into bed. But as he was lifting the thinning blanket he caught a glimpse of an owl heading towards his window. He opened it and took the package from the owl, which immediately left. He saw the Gringotts seal and read that it was what Dumbledore had left in his will. Harry wondered briefly why it had come to him after the letter. He opened it and took out a pensieve, the memories from last year, and… a wand. Harry knew that it was probably illegal to have more than a single wand, but treasured it more because it was Dumbledore's, so he decided to keep it. He would have to look at everything more closely tomorrow. He put it on top of his clothes and went to sleep with the alarm set for 8:30.

Harry woke on the alarm and quickly got ready. He fastened his tie in place and headed for the door to his bedroom. He slipped on his robe and pulled his hood up, placing Dumbledore's wand in his inside breast pocket. As he stepped on to the street, he thrust his wand into the unnaturally cold summer air and waited for the deafening bang. The garish, triple-decker bus appeared out of nowhere and Harry stepped onboard.

He stepped off at the Ministry of Magic, where he was scheduled to take his Apparition test, with a riotous stomach, not only from the ride, but also from Stan Shunpike's continued and highly undeserved absence. Harry had no patience for the Minister and his War Games, so he resolved himself not interact with said man until he had to, though he dreaded the day when he did have to face the stubborn politician.

Harry was so nervous that he would fail his test that he found himself once more at the Fountain of Magical Brethren, standing with a hand-full of coins that he was ready to toss in for luck. He was so preoccupied by this anxiousness that he hardly noticed that the statues were indeed back in place. He stared into the face of the smiling wizard and shook his head. They still didn't get the point that this was not how it was, nor would it be this way until some serious problems were fixed.

His thoughts occupied him all the way past Eric's security desk and down to the Apparition Test Center, wherein he proceeded to the front desk to a rather attractive witch he thought he had seen at Hogwarts many years ago.

"How may I help you?" asked the pretty witch behind the large desk.

"I'm here to take the Apparition test," said Harry, trying to smile at the witch, but managing only a lopsided grin, though she was oblivious to his struggle.

She took out a quill and what looked like a registration form. "You are 17?"

"Yes," said Harry, prouder than he expected to be when asked this question.

"How long have you been practicing?" she asked, now looking at him, and doing the familiar double take at his scar, though she lingered on his eyes much longer.

"I took the classes at Hogwarts last term," Harry informed her, noticing that as he answered the questions she filled in more of the form.

"Name?" she asked with a knowing smile.

"Harry Potter."

"Birth date?" she asked while filling in yet more of the form.

"July 31st, 1980."

"You're all set. Take this through that door to the left and you can begin. Good Luck." She smiled at him and handed him his forms as she pointed to the door.

Harry walked towards the door with a mounting nervousness that could've made Neville Longbottom faint. He had apparated only twice in his lifetime. As he approached the door he began to think that that wasn't nearly enough, but he continued bravely, or so it seemed. He tried to pick himself up, and after reminding himself that if he could take both himself and Dumbledore from the cave back to Hogwarts, then he should be fine, some of his confidence was restored. He walked through the door and nearly stepped on Professor Twycross.

"Ah, Mr. Potter," he beamed. "I had an inkling you'd be here the day you reached 17," he said looking at the forms. "Had great potential from what I saw."

"Thank you, sir," Harry said. "What do I do?"

"Don't be nervous, dear boy. I just need you to apparate to Hogsmeade and wait for me to get there and check you over, then back here without splinching yourself," he said, while motioning to Harry that he could begin when he was ready.

Harry stepped forward and twirled, thinking clearly of Hogsmeade, still with the confidence of apparating both himself and Dumbledore, and vanished with only the swish of his cloak.

- - - - -

Harry strolled down Diagon Alley with a definite bounce in his step. He was so happy about passing his test with flying colors that he decided to pay a visit to Fred and George. As he stepped into the shop he noticed that it appeared empty. They were most likely in the back somewhere. He perused the shelves, marveling at the ingenious contraptions and devices the twins had created. He had always wondered what went into making these. He lightly ran his fingers over them and had a tingling sensation in his fingertips that he couldn't place. He pulled his hand back and stared quizzically at it, wondering what he had just felt.

He examined his hand and looked around. "What the—"

"Harry!" shouted both twins upon reentering the shop from the back. "What brings you here?"

Harry's hand dropped to his side, forgotten, as he held up his newly acquired license, smiling rather cockily. The twins smirked at him.

"Finally got it, eh?" they asked him. "Ron is taking his this afternoon. Maybe he'll finally be able to get here without flooing like a prat. I can't believe he failed. Well maybe…"

"You guys have so much in here now," Harry remarked. "You must be rolling in it, eh?"

"All thanks to you, mate," said Fred, clapping him on the shoulder. "You moving out of that wretched muggle's house?"

"All my bags are already packed," Harry said. "I'll be at the Burrow later tonight."

"We'll be there tomorrow," George remarked. "Can't believe our git of a brother is actually making the mistake of getting married!" he said, though he was smiling broadly.

"Well, I'll see you then," said Harry, smiling at them. "I have to get some things."

Harry quickly walked down the street towards Knockturn Alley, shivering in the unnatural cold that the Dementors had created. He pulled up his hood and walked into one of the many bookshops that lined the dingy road. As he entered, the gnarled man at the front looked up sharply at him. Harry kept his hood over his eyes and waited for the man's reaction. He simply looked back down to the register and ignored Harry's presence. Harry took this as a good sign and perused the shelves. He picked out three books that looked particularly useful and brought them to the counter. He paid quickly and left, carrying with him: _Offensive Transfiguration_,_ Not So Charming Charms_, and _Fire with Fire. _He rapped his wand smartly on the stack and sent them to his room.

He always found it a bit comical the way people feared Knockturn Alley. It wasn't at all the one-stop shop for evil the way that people thought it was. It was just home to group of people who didn't like the idiots that came strolling in and out of Diagon Alley and had darker personalities and broader fairs than its neighbor. But of course with a broader range of material came a broader range of people. Give it a few hundred years and you've got a reputation for being a place where only the darkest of dark go.

As he walked back along Diagon Alley back to the Leaky Cauldron, Harry stopped and took a moment to stand and revel in the still, chilly yet refreshing air of the alley that, for the moment, seemed to tingle with excitement and happiness, though slightly marred by the disappearance of Olivander and Fortescue. But Harry couldn't help but think that the stillness of the air was only an omen. As he stood there, he felt rather like he was in the eye of a very turbulent storm, and, with his beloved headmaster gone, that things were going to become very violent, very fast. Harry thought of this and resolved to end, this horrible war as fast as he possibly could.

- - - - -

Petunia Dursley was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea after her morning scourging of the house. She had just finished; Vernon was bound to be coming home from work, and Dudley was out, though she had begun to doubt the validity of his 'tea party' stories since they were ending increasingly late. She knew that today was the Boy's birthday, because she remembered that today, whatever freakish protections that geezer had put on the house were gone. She, of course, spared no pearl of concern for her nephew, but was worried sick that that psycho would come looking for the Boy at her house. Almost as if summoned by this thought, Harry arrived. Petunia went milk white as she saw her nephew appear out of nothingness near the far streetlamp. He walked to the house bold as you please and walked into the kitchen, by which point Petunia was livid.

"How dare you just…_appear_, and lead whoever might be watching straight to our house!" she shrieked. "We put up with you for sixteen years, Boy! We put clothes on your back and food in your mouth, and you continue to defy us. You're an ungrateful, spoiled brat just like your mother."

This was the boiling point. It had been coming for sixteen years, and now it was here. Harry had once been scared, but now he saw that underneath all the anger and Dudley-coddling, there was a jealous, bitter woman. She despised Harry because he had the gift and the curse that both he and his mother had bore, and she hated both of them for it. She saw her better sister in his eyes every time she looked at him, and it drove her up the wall. There wouldn't be any harsh words or shouts of anger from him. He was done with this entire house and the people who lived in it.

"Just like my mother, eh?" he asked in a soft but audible whisper. He wouldn't even bother with the food part; they both knew that was a load of tripe. "Well that's good. I wouldn't want to turn out like you. I wouldn't want to break a child's spirit before he turns five, or turn my child into a dependent waste, or live my life in fear of anything that's as boring as me either. I'd rather die for something I love rather than forget it existed and pretend that it was an abomination when it died. And I most certainly wouldn't want to be as horrible a human being as you are now. When you die, you're going to wonder to yourself what's in store for you. I hope you're not religious, because if you are, you're going to suffer worse than anything you've put me through."

Her face was as white as chalk when he finished. Harry found it amazing how people faltered when they faced what his aunt did now. It was something about having all their sins laid bare, knowing that they've become monsters. He reveled in it. He relished it. It had always been something about being with the Dursley's that evaporated when he went to Hogwarts. It was a deep, consuming, and black as his old cupboard walls. Who, he used to think late at night in his cupboards, would do this to someone who had committed no crime? He'd realized that most people were as far from this as you could get, but that hate didn't just go away. It still festered for this woman and her fat husband.

His hate was primitive, and raw. He was after all, only eleven, but as he began to realize more and more that his life compared to others' was not what one would call ideal, his hate began to feed him. It taught him how to think, how to sleep, how to _live_. Live so that when he became old enough he would have his vengeance, one way or another, and soon his hatred gave way to apathy, expressing itself in cold sarcasm and indifference to his relatives. But now, in the face of his last minutes here in this prison, his hatred resurfaced, and he felt it creeping into the fabric of his very being not as hot anger, but as a slight amusement taken from his relative's pain.

He realized that her hands were shaking, and that her pale cheeks had given way into dark pink. She reached over and seized a frying pan, and before he could blink, it was hurtling at him. Time seemed to slow down. He leaned back and watched it pass his mildly surprised face, reached up and grabbed the handle, pivoted, and threw it through the kitchen window. Amid the shattered glass, Harry was thankful for all those years of reflex training for Quidditch. He was, after all, the best Seeker in a century.

"You wait," she hissed at him through clenched teeth, "Vernon will arrive soon –"

As she said this, Vernon's car pulled into the drive. Silence reigned as they both heard the car door slam until he entered the kitchen. He saw the broken glass, the livid Petunia, and the frying pan on the front lawn and immediately started towards Harry.

"Boy! What have you done this time?" hissed Vernon, his face a deep shade of puce.

"He's flaunting his freakishness," she sneered, "across the neighborhood!"

"I'm leaving," Harry said calmly, though with a hint of suppressed satisfaction. "You will never see me again, dead or alive."

"If I had a choice, I'd rather see you dead!" Petunia hissed.

Harry felt the room temperature drop as she said this. Apparently, so did she. She fell silent and waited for his response. Harry smiled and extracted his wand. "I wonder how much longer you'll live to see anything," he said as he rolled his wand in his fingers. He looked up and leered at Petunia and she paled once more, though this time with a slight tinge of green. How fitting, Harry thought.

"THAT'S IT, BOY!" said Vernon, approaching fast. "I'M GOING TO BEAT THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF YOU LIKE I SHOULD HAVE YEARS AGO!"

He swung a fist at Harry, but he wasn't fast enough. Harry sidestepped him, and seized his throat. He shoved his uncle against the wall, and with seemingly unnatural strength, held him fast. His wand was digging deliciously deep into Vernon's throat. It would be so easy, he thought, to just say the words. He knew without knowing how that that was all it would take. He had _more _than enough hatred for _this_. He slowly mastered the impulse and threw his uncle sideways as hard as he could. His message was clear.

"I hate you, regret the day I took you into my house," Petunia hissed angrily at him. "I hope that maniac kills you!"

"Goodbye," said Harry, somehow no longer caring. His Aunt had never cared about him and he thought to himself that perhaps none of it mattered at this point. "Hopefully I'll never have to come back again."

Petunia watched him leave her kitchen for the last time, and no matter how hard she resisted the thought, she couldn't help but wonder what her sister, her parents, any decent person for that matter, would have said about her at that moment. She had taken her sister's child and mistreated him from before the time he could even speak or walk, and likewise punished him after for his faults, and more so for his good points. She had hated him because he was smarter than Dudley, better looking, kinder, braver, more mature, and any number of other things. She had hated him because he, like his mother, had the power that Petunia had been denied as a child. Despite her inhuman treatment of her nephew, she couldn't help thinking that it had made him strong. He would never need to be comforted, or consoled, or made to feel loved and, for a brief moment she marveled at his strength of character, for how many others could have turned out so well after that kind of childhood?

And now, as she heard him slam the door to the room he had stayed in for the last six years, she understood the abuse Dumbledore had spoken of. She had spoilt Dudley beyond repair, and it would be Dudley who paid for her mistake in every stage of his life, and, faced with her current situation, she was flooded with regret for her actions, and sorrow for herself. She knew it was too late to fix things, this being Harry's last summer there. The thing she perhaps now regretted most about her mistreatment of Harry was how introverted he had become as he grew into an adult. He hadn't even noticed the times that she had peeked into his room this summer and seen him poring over the books he had from that school with titles involving freakish things like _Charms_, and _Transfiguration_. As she considered it now, she thought her prejudice against magic hardly mattered anymore, now that she remembered her treatment of Harry from a different perspective. She heard the front door open and close again and felt sorry for Harry for the first time in her life, and hung her head as Vernon muttered things about 'good riddance' from his place on the ceiling.

Harry briskly walked to his soon-to-be-abandoned room and gathered his things to the middle of the floor. He brandished his wand angrily at them as he sent them to The Burrow and walked out the front door. The mist resulting from the breeding of Dementors came up to his ankles in the cool, dusky air, and he felt free as he crossed the threshold of his former house and paced down the street. Without looking back, Harry Potter got to the last streetlamp and was gone without a sound, never again to return to Little Whinging, Surrey.

* * *

**AN: Sorry if it was boring, but I had to get the basics out of the way, the foundations if you will. I'd also like to give credit to Rosie5, in case anyone noticed the similarities between our last sentence involving Harry leaving the Dursleys' (final apparition and all). About the thing with Ginny, I'm sorry guys but for all purposes and intentions...she's 16, and she's not gonna wait. I can understand that in the book they are actually in love, because there's only seven of them, but with my plans for Harry, it's only fair that I leave his options open, lol.**

**Thanks for reading**

**Afrojack **


	3. The Laws of Asylum and Sanctuary

**AN: Review please, lol, I only have one. I'm starting to think that maybe it isn't so good if no one will review it. Well anyways, this is my first story so all suggestions are welcome.**

* * *

**The Laws of Asylum and Sanctuary**

Harry reappeared in the middle of a darkened square of decrepit houses and cracked pavement. He began pacing forward to the space between Number 11 and 13 with a smirk on his face, knowing that there was a safe-haven he needed to prepare before he arrived at the Weasley's house, though he knew they would be undoubtedly worried by his lateness. As he reached the sidewalk, a large foreboding mansion materialized and squeezed those surrounding it out of its way. He had to stop and calm himself as he gazed upon his godfather's hated prison of over a year.

Just looking at this place brought unbidden memories to the forefront of his mind, and he knew immediately that living in this place while searching for the shreds of Voldemort's soul would take some getting used to. However, Harry was unbelievably relieved to see that the Fidelius Charm Dumbledore had placed on the manor was still very active. Harry remembered vaguely that Sirius had said that his father had placed an innumerable amount of dark charms and defensive spells on this place, and hardly doubted him, now sensing the nauseous feeling that washed over him in his close proximity to the house.

Harry reached towards the door handle before once again realizing, as he had in the summer before his fifth year, that none was present. He remembered that Lupin had simply tapped the door with his wand, but he doubted that would work in this situation. Harry was on the verge of giving up when he remembered Dumbledore hacking his way through Voldemort's protections and decided to have a go at it. Despite the fact that he owned this place now, he didn't know a way to get in. Saying, "I'm the owner, let me in," probably wasn't going to work.

Harry whipped on his Invisibility Cloak and stepped up to the door as he pulled out his wand. Leave it to him to have to put out the lights in an entire street without a put-outer. Tentatively, Harry pointed his wand into the air, and forcefully commanded, "_Nox!" _The effect was instantaneous. Every street-lamp in the square darkened and Harry was immensely satisfied by his success. Now he faced the dilapidated door with considerable confidence, wondering how best to continue. Following Dumbledore's example, he placed his palm flat upon the smooth surface of the black door. He almost passed out.

Years and years of old, powerful magic overwhelmed his mind. Harry quickly took his hand off the door, disoriented by the deluge of spell work he had been smashed with. He shook his head and considered that perhaps he should have narrowed his search before charging in so foolishly. This time, placing only his fingertips on the door, Harry searched with his mind for breaks in the extremely tangled webs of magic he sensed surrounding the house. He searched fruitlessly for minutes upon minutes, finding no cracks in the wall of protection, until he finally found a fissure in what felt like a particularly old spell and wrenched it apart with his magic. It struggled against him, but he overpowered it after a few seconds of effort.

As it turned out, that wasn't a smart idea, either. The door opened violently and Harry was spontaneously thrown away from the house like a rag-doll while his shirt developed a huge burn mark in it, revealing red, irritated skin underneath. Harry pointed his wand at the burn, hoping that _Episkey_ would work. After he put a substantial amount of force behind his spell, the skin reluctantly healed itself. However embarrassed he was, he was happy and extremely proud that he had successfully forced the door. However, he would definitely have to fine-tune this skill, for Voldemort's protections were bound to have stronger and less breakable protections, and breaking them with brute force would undoubtedly kill him.

Harry walked through the door and closed it behind him, knowing that it had disappeared to any onlookers outside. As the door clicked shut, the street outside was flooded with light once more and Harry whipped off his cloak and slid down the wall, only just now noticing how tired he was. After a few minutes, Harry assessed the damage he had done to the house with his magical break-in. He imagined that there was now a gaping hole, which he would have to re-ward. A sudden thought struck him. If he could see the house, so could Snape, being a former member of the Order, and that was no good. He would have to add some suitable protection, but he had no knowledge of warding. The way around that problem would have to wait.

Harry explored the house from top to bottom, searching for any sign of life, but the Order had obviously remained out of Headquarters. He found many books in the attic that they had deemed questionable, and began to search for books on Warding. Near the bottom of the sixth pile of books he found an aged, stiff book entitled '_Warding & Protection Moste Po'erful_' He was glad to have found this because he was growing increasingly disturbed by the titles he had passed, including '_Dismemberment for the Dimwitted', 'Erstfole's Evile Evocation Guide', 'The Grimoire of Gruesome Gore', _and, to him, perhaps most disturbingly, '_Bloody Potions & Fleshy Concoctions'. _This rather forcefully reminded Harry of Voldemort's resurrection in his fourth year.

Harry took the aging tome downstairs to the foyer, balanced it on his forearm, and opened it to the Table of Contents. He found a suitable spell called The Ward of Asylum and waved his hand absentmindedly, flipping the book to the correct page. According to the complicated diagram and directions, he had to trace the doorframe whilst chanting a spell and then place blood on the door. It seemed simple enough, though he knew blood magic was regarded with great suspicion and fear. Harry swept this thought aside and, with the book still on his forearm, began the spell. Preconceptions had to be done away with in the greater scheme of protecting himself and his friends.

He began the spell in the bottom-left corner as the book suggested, making sure the door was firmly closed before he started. He began to repeat the frustratingly long Latin phrase while slowly tracing the frame of the door with the tip of his wand. As he swept the wand under the door and re-connected with the bottom-left corner, all the openings in the house sealed themselves with a squelching sound, and the same white glow in the outline of the front door was visible in the outlines of the rest of the doors and windows. Harry looked back at the book in his arms, sweating with the effort of keeping the spell up, and revoked his earlier thought about this being simple.

Reading the next step, he tapped each corner of the door and thrust his wand into the center, the magic from the spell stopping the wand about an inch before it actually collided. The circular diagram from the book appeared in the center of the door and around his feet. Threads of magic crawled from the edges of the door. They crept along the walls in a glowing, white, spider-web pattern around the corner and over what Harry suspected to be every wall in the house, loosely covering everything except the doorways. Harry stared transfixed at the diagram, marveling at the runes that rotated just outside the edge of the glowing circle, the pyramid in the center remaining motionless. He had never even seen magic like this performed, much less done it himself.

Now came the last step. Shaking with exertion, he used his wand to make a straight cut across his palm, which he then placed in the center of the circular pattern on the door. His blood snaked out along the web-like strands of magic and over the complicated diagram, replacing the magic with blood in the same pattern. Then the design sank into the walls, and the cracks in the doors flashed, and Harry knew the spell had worked. He took his hand off the door, and looked at his palm, which no longer bore any sign of a cut. He smiled, knowing now that anyone with ill intention was locked out. He suspected that this might have been the spell Dumbledore had placed on Number 4. He glanced at the grandfather clock and saw that he had no time to ponder this further as it was now just past midnight and the Weasleys were probably starting to form a search party.

He felt cold and shaky, but threw on his cloak and stepped outside once more anyway; he needed to get to the Burrow. As he closed the door behind him, he examined the magic surrounding it and beamed with pride when he saw that the edges and corners of Number 12 Grimmauld Place were highlighted by a dark red, glowing streak of magic. It squeezed itself out of sight once more and Harry walked to the edge of the square. Making fully sure that the house wasn't visible, he smiled, spun sharply, and, like the house, was gone in an instant.

- - - - -

Harry reappeared at the back of the Burrow and sank to his knees. His ward spell had made him feel like going to sleep and not waking up for a very long time. He glanced Mrs. Weasley through the window, sitting at the table with a cup of tea, shuffling through a considerable amount of papers. He could only assume that these were plans and bills for the wedding, as he had never seen Mrs. Weasley in office-mode before. He stepped to the door and knocked twice, and then he heard muffled steps coming towards the door.

"Who's there?" asked Mrs. Weasley through the door, slightly nervous.

"It's Harry, sorry I'm late Mrs. Weasley." Harry waited for the question that would affirm his identity.

"What put Arthur in St. Mungo's last year?" she quizzed.

"Nagini." Harry said firmly.

The door swung wide revealing his would-be mother's warm features and before he could say hello he was swept into a hug that didn't stop until he thought he heard his spine creak ominously. She ushered him in and closed the door, which she then locked with her wand.

"Come in dear, you look dead on your feet," she said in a motherly tone.

"Thank you. I'm going to go straight to sleep. I'm exhausted. Which room should I head to?" Harry asked, already drowsy from thoughts of a warm bed.

"Fred and George's room, dear. You'll be bunking with the rest of the boys since there are others here for the wedding. Your stuff is already there, we saw it arrive in the back garden earlier today," she said, patting him on the back and pushing him towards the stairs.

Harry reached the room and opened the door to a rather disturbingly synchronized symphony of snores.

"Only the Weasleys," Harry muttered under his breath with a bemused smirk on his face.

He saw his bed and moved silently toward it so as not to wake any of the snoring occupants of the room, and changed into his pajamas. He climbed into bed, glad at all he had accomplished that day, and drifted off into sleep. He was dreaming that he had to apparate himself and Dumbledore again, except this time he stepped into the sharp turn only to be squeezed mercilessly by the all-to-familiar sensation, and this time it wasn't stopping. He wondered if this was splinching, but couldn't think any longer as his need for oxygen increased. He woke up and gasped for air, and then realized that Hermione was hugging him fiercely and that it was morning. Ron was smirking behind her, although it didn't reach his eyes. He also noticed that Ginny was conspicuously absent.

"Once again Harry, you fail to tell us of your arrival." Hermione admonished, though her tone was amused.

"I'm sorry; I had to tie up some ends yesterday. Hi Ron," he smiled at Ron, who stopped smirking and smiled genuinely. "How's the wedding preparation?"

"Murder, I tell you, being fitted for robes, setting up chairs," Ron complained. "It's a nightmare, Harry," he said, sending a mutinous glare through the floorboards, as if it were their fault.

"I think it's been wonderful!" gushed Hermione, with a girlish tone. "All this wedding stuff, and dresses, and all kinds of things being brought in. I think it's just so romantic."

"Yeah," said Ron, "you and every other female in this house. I swear, Harry, they all melt when a wedding comes around. It's like clockwork."

Hermione glared at him. Harry had remained silent through this whole conversation, simply reveling in being with his friends. He had been smirking at Ron and Hermione knowingly the whole time, though this was noticed by neither, so enthralled by the argument as they both were. Harry still had an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach about them dating, but who was he to interrupt because he didn't want to be a third wheel? Hermione left the room and Ron sat on another bed, there being so many in the room.

"So," he said nervously looking at Harry, "are we still going on that hunt instead of heading for Hogwarts?"

"I am," said Harry; he'd been expecting this question. "This is something I have to do, no matter how awkward it will be to come back for my seventh year at 18…" he trailed off.

"You won't have to, mate," said Ron, looking at him quizzically. "You can still take the N.E.W.T.'s at the end of the year, we just have to study while we hunt. But," whispered Ron, "I was thinking that Hogwarts might be a good decision, at least for me because the school year might be better this year since tonight I'm asking Hermione—"

What Ron was going to ask Hermione, Harry never found out, because at that moment Harry was greeted yet again by a vision of perfection as Hermione walked into the room with a breakfast tray and handed it over to Harry. Harry proceeded to wolf down his breakfast, now extremely hungry as a result of his exertion last night, while his friends chatted about who-knows-what.

Just then Mrs. Weasley entered and told them to start getting ready for the wedding, and asked Harry if he had dress robes. Harry blanched. "I'll just apparate to Diagon Alley really fast and pick some out," he told Mrs. Weasley. "I'll be back soon."

"Hurry dear," she said, looking at him reproachfully. "The wedding is in four hours!"

Harry ran out of the house and apparated to the Leaky Cauldron, where he was greeted warmly by Tom. Harry rushed to the brick wall and tapped the bricks that opened the archway. He hurried down the street to Madame Malkin's, wherein he breathlessly asked for dress robes.

"Which color?" she asked, measuring him. "Blue, Green, Red…Yellow?" she asked with a smirk.

"Black will be fine," said Harry in a slightly cold voice, miffed by her last, flamboyant suggestion.

She smiled at him and, after the measuring was done, went to fetch the black robes she had in stock. She returned with more robes draped over her arm than Harry could have imagined she could carry. He pushed this thought aside and began to look through the pile of robes in earnest. He found a pitch-black one with silver trim, paid quickly and left. He was about to step into a twist when he remembered that he had no gift for Bill and Fleur. This resulted in a strange _Crack! _That carried him about three feet. Glad he hadn't splinched himself, Harry headed to a shop to get a gift for the couple.

He disapparated back to the Burrow and arrived in what appeared to be a scene of mass hysteria. There were people running here, doing this, saying that, and there were _a lot_ of them. He wound his way back upstairs through the flocks of random people, where he quickly found an unoccupied bathroom and rapidly showered. He left the room to find a line of people waiting for him. He smiled embarrassedly and hurried away as some gave him vaguely annoyed looks. He changed into a shirt and tie, put on his trousers, and pulled the robes on over them. As he appraised himself in the full-length mirror in Ron's room, he thought that perhaps there was life after Ginny, though he still had a sore spot over her. He was confused as to why he hadn't seen Bill or Fleur, but wrote it off as some odd tradition and sauntered down the stairs into the crammed kitchen. He grabbed an apple and sat down, waiting for the wedding to begin. The time came for everyone to head to the garden and as Harry crossed the threshold of the back door, Mrs. Weasley engulfed him.

"Oh, Harry," she cried, "You look so nice!"

Harry flushed. "Thank you,"

He noticed that Mrs. Weasley seemed highly emotional, and so moved away to join the rest of the people who were milling about aimlessly just as he was. He saw Tonks, who greeted him enthusiastically, perhaps too much so, as she stumbled on her way to hug him. Remus Lupin followed after, looking at Tonks with a ridiculous smile as he saw her stumble.

"Hello, Harry," Remus said as he reached him. "How've you been?"

"Fine," said Harry, smiling at his favorite professor. "How goes the business?" he asked referring to Lupin's underground operation.

Lupin's face sunk a little. "The werewolves were very interested in Dumbledore's death," he stated somberly. "They now know that Voldemort has the upper-hand in the war, and sadly, I can't blame them. There's really no point in going back. The question of which side they're on is basically answered."

"Right rays of sunshine you two are," joked Tonks. "You'd think we weren't at a wedding…" she finished sarcastically.

Ignoring this, Harry asked, "Any luck finding Snape?"

"No," said Lupin stiffly, glancing back at Tonks' remark with a slight smile on his face. "He continues to run like the coward that he is."

Sensing that Lupin would divulge no more, and seeing that everyone was taking seats, Harry wandered off towards the back row, where Hermione was seated. He sat down next to her and she smiled at him. He looked around and asked her where she had gone after he had left for Diagon Alley.

"I went to get ready," she said, gesturing at her dress, which Harry noticed made her look just as good as she had at the Yule Ball. He wondered distractedly what Ginny would be wearing. "You should see Fleur," Hermione said, snapping him back to the present. "She's stunning."

"What else could she be?" asked Harry bemusedly. "She's a veela."

Hermione raised one delicately arched eyebrow but said nothing. Harry's musing was interrupted by Remus and Tonks taking seats next to them, followed by the procession starting. He looked around and saw a whole side of what looked like a very haughty group of people that could only be Fleur's family. Harry watched as Ron shuffled past with Gabrielle, looking extremely red and twitchy. Hermione scowled next to him and Harry once again was made uncomfortable by the thought of his two friends dating. He next watched as Ginny demurely sauntered past, gripping the arm of Charlie, and not even glancing at Harry, which caused a pang of something like hurt to ring through him. Luckily for Harry, the remaining bridal party couple aroused no further strange negative feelings.

Harry looked towards the front and spotted Bill, looking euphoric with a thin scar cascading down from his hairline to his chin vertically, and another that started at his opposite cheek and ran across the bridge of his nose past the intersection with the other scar. Harry thought it looked rather cool in a blatant, macho way. At this thought, he laughed quietly to himself. A tall wizard in a brown robe strode up to the podium where Bill stood with Charlie. The minister had sandals on and a rope-belt, which Harry loosely associated with the garments of a friar. He was eager to see how wizarding matrimony was performed and so sat attentively.

"Please cross your wands at the handle, Bill and Fleur," he said with a gentle smile, "and repeat after me."

"I do swear to be faithful, protect my spouse, and hereby share all that I possess with them."

Bill and Fleur repeated this simultaneously, smiling at each other.

"Please place the rings on the fingers, and I will unite you."

After Bill and Fleur had the rings on, the friar took out his wand, which had what looked like a crosshair on the bottom, and made a lazy circle that encompassed the joined wands. Bill and Fleur's wands glowed at the tips and their rings glowed faintly white before fading.

"I now," beamed the friar, "pronounce you man and wife!"

Harry smiled as cheers filled the garden and looked to where Mrs. Weasley was sitting, with a small mountain of tissues piled at her feet. Harry marveled at how succinct and to-the-point that had been. Bill shook Arthur's hand firmly and they hugged for a long minute, which made Mrs. Weasley sob even harder. Fleur was positively glowing with happiness, being hugged and kissed by her family, and Harry had to fight hard not to whip out his wand and set everything ablaze in a fit of power with which to impress her. Harry cursed veela magic as he forced the tickles of persuasion from the edges of his consciousness. Harry turned to Hermione and noticed that Remus and Tonks had disappeared, and that she was considerably closer to him than she had previously been, with tears in her eyes.

She noticed his confused look and explained. "I'm sorry, weddings make me so emotional," she dabbed at her eyes with what Harry knew to be a conjured handkerchief and turned to him. "It's so nice to see happiness at a time like this."

"It is," he agreed, "but I need to tell you about last night."

Her face immediately looked interested. "What did you do? I've been meaning to ask you why you were so late."

"I went to Headquarters," he whispered. "I had to force my way into the house because I didn't know how to get in."

"You forced the wards?" she queried. "How?"

"I don't know," he said. "It was like I could manipulate the defenses around the house and forced them to let me in."

"Harry that's—"

"There's more," interrupted Harry. "After I got in, there was this gaping hole in the wards, and I had to cast a new one to protect the house since I knew that Snape knew where the house was and probably knew how to get in."

Her face lit up in surprise. "I hadn't thought of that," she exclaimed. "Wow, I'm glad you figured it out and put a new ward on. Which did you use?"

"The Ward of Asylum," recited Harry.

"Never heard of it," said Hermione. "What does it do?"

"It's a blood ward that keeps people with ill intent out." Harry told her.

"Harry," she whispered frantically, "blood magic is dark, no matter the use! Not to mention extremely complex. How'd you manage?"

"I don't know," Harry lied, knowing that what he'd done last night had been impressive magic. "I did a lot of weird magic last night. You should have seen it though, Hermione, it was amazing to see magic like that."

"Like what?" asked Hermione, weakly.

"There was this strange diagram," he began. "Everything was so intricate. It's strange when it's not just waving a wand and saying a few words, almost more _real. _Makes you realize just how powerful magic can be…"

"Harry," she said worriedly, "be careful; potent magic does strange things to wizards, physically and emotionally."

She noticed that as he remembered last night, Harry had an odd gleam in his eyes. It was a strange, eager kind of gleam. She realized that this must have been a side effect of performing something highly complex. She clearly remembered the feeling of magical achievement, having experienced it so many times in her studies, but she didn't ever think it had made her look like _that._

"I'll be careful Hermione," he said, the weird look gone. "I promise — "

They were interrupted by everyone heading to the tables nearer the house, which they now saw were heaped and creaking with food. They got up and joined Ron as he moved quickly towards the buffet.

Harry and Ron chatted amicably while enjoying the massive party with the Weasleys and Fleur's family, though Harry was slightly annoyed by the calculating glances he was receiving from Hermione. The trio quickly learned that the Delacours knew how to party, as the alcohol consumption reached record highs while Fred and George entertained them with stories and pranks, and the happy atmosphere permeated the air with positive energy. Harry had never seen a rowdier group of people.

"We'll be staying at Grimmauld place," Harry told Ron and Hermione, "if you two still want to come."

"Of course we do, mate!" said Ron. "Though I think your taste in safe spots could use some tweaking."

The party continued strong well into the early morning hours, though it began to wane at around three. Finally it was only the Weasleys, Harry, Hermione, and Remus sitting awake at the kitchen table. Tonks had left earlier after kissing Remus goodbye, and had left a very red werewolf in her wake. Bill and Fleur were on their Honeymoon already and everyone was sitting in content silence around the kitchen table drinking coffee, except Ginny who, still refusing to be around Harry, had gone to bed as soon as the party was over. There were guests still around, but they were asleep and would be leaving the next day.

Then, without warning, the lights went out throughout the house. Harry knew immediately what was happening, the cold sense of dread and absence of happiness having hit just before the lights flickered out.

"Odd," said Mr. Weasley, getting up from the table and moving towards the window.

"Dementors," whispered Harry, panicked. "They're getting closer."

Mr. Weasley, Remus, Charlie and the twins immediately sprang into action, moving towards the door. Harry and Ron made to follow but Remus stopped them at the sliding-glass door to the back yard.

"Stay inside." Remus told them sternly, pulling out his wand.

"I can help!" Harry said loudly, "Let me go outside and fight them off!"

"No, Harry," insisted Remus, "there are too many of them."

Harry was sick of being treated like a child, but obeyed his father's childhood friend out of respect and watched as the group of other adults headed out to face the swarm of Dementors. Anger raged through his veins at being forced to stay behind; a fully qualified wizard made to wait like a minor. After a few minutes of fighting, the horrid creatures were slowly overcoming Remus and the rest, and Harry's anger was mixed rapidly with morbid fear and panic. Unbidden, more of Dumbledore's parting letter came back to him.

_Your emotions give you strength, Harry, and fuel your power. It is your greatest advantage in the coming darkness, but do not let them rule you! That is your greatest weakness! Use them Harry, but do not let them make you foolish and stupid…_

Harry felt his emotions flood him and slashed his wand at the door, which slid back so hard that the glass cracked. He looked back at the rest of the people in the room. They had been frozen with fear, but now they were looking at him with a sort of strange, scared confusion. He shrugged it off and stalked down the lawn towards the now retreating adults. He ignored their yells as he strode past them. He looked at the swarming Dementors and thought of nothing but the defeat of Voldemort. He brandished his wand and finished the motion with a whip-like slash, thrusting his wand straight into the air.

His wand vibrated as a silver light brighter than any Lumos spell illuminated the entire garden with shimmers of light, though it was not a stag that shot like a large missile out his wand, but what he could only recognize as a huge bird of prey. As it reached the Dementors it opened its talons and repeatedly slashed them, moving as fast as a bullet, driving them back until they were gliding away. Harry didn't yet know what it was, but this new beast resonated with a new kind of hope as it soared high into the air and let out a cry that echoed across the fields, proud and strong, almost arrogant in it's victory call. The Patronus soared back to him gracefully and perched on the tip of his wand. It bowed its head and looked at him.

"Fawkes?" he questioned disbelievingly, though his mind had quietly registered _'Dumbledore…'_

It blinked at him, spread its wings and ignited in silvery flames before fading away. Harry knew that had been Dumbledore, guarding him again, as he always had, and knew in his heart that it was the last piece of Dumbledore he had received. Harry would treasure his new Patronus; he missed his Stag, but his father would always have a place in his heart. This was a reminder that his headmaster would never completely leave him. Harry smiled and began to walk back towards the Burrow. As he went inside, which was thankfully lit again, he was swept into a soft hug by Mrs. Weasley, which somehow meant more than her bear hugs. He peered over the top of her head and saw the rest of them smiling at him. The other guests had risen and Harry hated to think what would have happened had they not been able to drive the Dementors back. He walked over to the sliding-glass door and ran his wand along the length of the crack, repairing it.

"That was incredible, Harry!" Hermione screamed as she embraced him right after Mrs. Weasley let go of him.

"They came a little late," Mr. Weasley said with a hint of amusement. "Must've gotten something wrong."

"You should have seen yourself," Ron added, smirking at him, obviously intent on teasing him mercilessly. "Striding out there all macho and brandishing your wand to summon a huge white bird."

Harry smiled wryly at him, flushing as he was ribbed. "My Patronus changed," he said, trying to change the subject. "It's not a stag anymore."

"We noticed," Lupin replied sarcastically, "though all we could see from here was that it was a rather large…" (he smirked) "bird."

"What was it, mate?" Ron asked. "Eagle? Hawk? Falcon?"

"Eagle," Harry lied, maddened by Hermione and Remus' knowing grins. "Dunno why it changed…" For some reason, Harry didn't want to spend the next half-hour explaining the phoenix phenomenon to the Weasleys.

He felt that his new Patronus was something of a secret between him and Dumbledore, and he wouldn't be letting it go any time soon. He told them he was going to sleep and started for the stairs, wondering for a second what the look Mrs. Weasley was giving Hermione meant. He climbed the steps, smiling at his success of driving away that sizable swarm of Dementors. He looked longingly at Ginny's door, but passed silently into Ron's room.

As Hermione watched Harry leave, she began to notice changes in him that she thought would have been hard-placed to occur over one summer. He was now as tall as Ron, and that his eyes seemed far more intense than before, like something had considerably changed about him. She chalked it up to growing, but had a nagging feeling that it was something deeper. She played a few games of chess with Ron, all of which she lost miserably, and headed for bed, wondering what was going on with her best friend.

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**For any who might be wondering what I had in mind when I was writing about the diagram from the book, think of a pentagram with a pyramid in the center instead of the five-point star and runes just inside the edge of the circle. For Americans it would be very similar to the pyramid on the one-dollar bill, and for anyone who plays Warcraft, think of an AOE spell. Review...please?**

**Thanks for reading,**

**Afrojack**


	4. Quiet Confidence

**This chapter is mainly filler, not really any action but bear with me, its necessary to set up a few plot points and some character development, so here it is.**

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**Quiet Confidence**

The sun was casting grey shadows as it filtered through the dingy windows of Grimmauld Place. The weak illumination lightly fell across the many old artifacts about the house in a way that truly marked the great age of the dilapidated manor. Among the paragons of ancient Dark wizarding history, there were texts and crumpled sheets of parchment strewn carelessly over tables, the signs of people working tirelessly. While the spell-books were hardly as old as the other archaic antiques that were left over from the scouring of this place, they contained old, basic knowledge that most every wizard to pass through Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had learnt during their last year of education there. They showed signs of being well used, for indeed they were being read thoroughly by the three occupants of the house that, despite its old grandeur, now lay broken and in filthy disrepair. The pale light that was bleeding through the open shutters graced the face of a trio of parchments bearing the Hogwarts crest, glinting on a pair of badges reading Head Boy and Head Girl respectively, and illuminating a slightly yellowing newspaper from weeks before. It bore an emboldened headline and a story mainly about one of the three people living in the house, though he had been disgusted by the fact that the paper had written about him and his friends.

**Where is Harry Potter?**

_The famous (perhaps infamous?) Boy-Who-Lived has apparently opted out of his final year of magical schooling. Personal interviews with reliable sources within the school have confirmed that, indeed, Harry Potter and his two most faithful friends, Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger, have not returned for their would-be seventh year. According to the sources we have stationed at or near the school, we have gathered that the fear of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has inspired this unusual absence of the Boy-Who-Lived from the halls of Hogwarts. "We in Slytherin know he's just too scared too show his face. Him and his little cronies, that is," said the vivacious and attractive seventh-year, Pansy Parkinson, who has provided information from within Hogwarts on earlier occa—_

The article was stopped there, the page had been very obviously ignited in flames, most likely by Harry, having always detested the _Daily Prophet_ for this very reason. Aside from the fact that Rita Skeeter was still banned from Hogwarts, he could hardly believe that the biased opinions of Pansy Parkinson had been published yet again as front-page material amidst all of the things that were going on in the world. It sickened him. It didn't matter that much though. The writings of a paper that had given its front page over to gossip articles was hardly worth concern in comparison to the matters immediately at hand, for Harry, Ron, and Hermione had been working harder perhaps than they ever had imagined as, near the end of September, they found themselves near the middle of their year's curriculum while their classmates has just begun. They had been there since early August, and although two months wasn't much time, they had skipped anything that wasn't battle-orientated.

The situation was magnified for Harry, for while he was learning the principles and spells from seventh-year materials, he was also studying and practicing the spells from the books he had purchased in Knockturn Alley, leaving him stretched thin to say the least. Because they had been purchased on the notorious street, Ron and Hermione were extremely wary of them. Harry quickly discovered that they were obviously meant for wizards that were beyond the halls of Hogwarts…and who apparently had a taste for flare and borderline nastiness, as they included impossibly complex concepts and spells, sometimes detailing gruesome disfigurement and pain.

This, however, was rather surprisingly only a minor difficulty in Harry's path as his odd study habits worked in his favor. Because he would learn the basics for the things in his advanced books while studying the seventh-year texts with Ron and Hermione, they were still fresh in his mind while he studied the complex theories in his darker books, which made doing the magic much easier to practice and master. There was that and the fact that he was utterly determined and resolved to learn, a more powerful factor than any other during this quest. That wasn't to say that it was not difficult, often forcing Harry to spend great spans of time reading the theory and practicing the magic, many times requiring hours on end to master the harder spells. The hard part about what was in the books was not the incantations, for they were often short and very concise, or the wand movements, regularly requiring a mere jab, twirl, slash, jerk, or whip-like motion.

The hard part about the magic was the understanding of the way magic worked, needed to perform them correctly and effectively. The intent and ability to pull the magic from within was ninety percent of the mastery, which heartened Harry because he had always had an aptitude for intentional magic when his heart was in it.

This particular moment, however, was not witness to intense study or persistent practice. Ron and Harry were playing chess, chatting idly and spending the Sunday afternoon hours squandering away the day in an attempt to relax. Hermione had gone to the library to search for leads on the Horcruxes, as she felt that now they had studied up some, hunting a shard of Voldemort's shattered soul wouldn't be a total suicide mission. This left Harry and Ron, who were sick of working for the time-being, without a motivation, which resulted in them being able to do what they pleased while she was gone. And so they sat, chatting amiably about random topics in the drawing room while the pieces on the board waged a battle of epic proportions. It remained blissfully so until Ron mentioned something offhandedly that jolted the conversation very suddenly in an uncomfortable way.

"You know," Ron began in an odd tone, "Hermione's been really worried about you lately, since the wedding at least."

At that abrupt change in direction, Harry felt as though he had been in a car that had swerved too sharply as he felt something akin to his head slamming into an unyielding windshield.

"Has she?" he asked, blinking slowly while he gathered his thoughts.

"Yeah," said Ron, frowning slightly. "She started when you told her about that wicked blood-ward you cast, got even worse when she saw you here."

Harry looked back down to the chessboard and pensively moved his queen to take Ron's knight, thinking rather hard about what to say next. Against his better judgement, he decided to be difficult about this, knowing that it was bound to become kind of weird intervention that wasn't needed at all.

"What about what she sees here?" Harry asked, honestly wondering what he was doing that was causing concern while at the same time wishing that they were still talking about inconsequential things like how much they hated Malfoy and Snape.

"Don't be difficult, Harry," Ron chastised, giving him a stern, knowing look as he moved a castle.

"No really," Harry insisted, slaughtering Ron's bishop in a way that made him appreciate the brutality of Wizard's Chess. "Tell me what I'm doing wrong."

"Well, for one," Ron said offhandedly taking Harry's rook, "we hardly see you outside of studies. You're always off with those weird books."

"S'not like either of you mind, I'm sure," Harry retorted, prodding a particularly spirited pawn forward.

"What're you saying?" Ron asked in a suspicious voice, all pretenses of chess dropped as Harry touched a rather sensitive nerve.

Harry smiled at Ron's slightly panicked tone, but replied evenly while he waited for Ron's move. "If you don't know, I find myself reluctant to enlighten you, although I'm fairly certain you know exactly what I meant."

Ron looked uncomfortable for a moment before he valiantly pursued his previous point once more, much to Harry's dismay. "That's not the point," he persisted, taking one of Harry's more efficient bishops.

"I figured as much," said Harry who, thanks to his years of avoiding emotional weakness at the Dursleys', had begun to detach himself from the awkward situation. "We haven't reached a point this whole time. Amazing how elusive it can be sometimes, eh?" he said a little sarcastically.

"The point is," Ron said with a smirk at Harry's comment as he took Harry's other bishop, "we see you in different rooms every day casting spells that make the floors shake, turning chairs into dogs and whatever else. It's consuming you. Not to mention the countless times I've walked in and seen you feeling the walls like a blind man or a weirdo, touching all the cursed objects or hovering your fingers a few inches away, examining them until you're blue in the face for some unknown reason."

"So what?" Harry asked, taking Ron's remaining knight. "It's all for the best. I still spend the better part of the day with you and Hermione, I'm doing all that weird stuff to get better so I can kill Voldemort, and we both know that you probably appreciate the time with Hermione. What's the problem?" He finished his rant with more anger than he had expected.

"Because," Ron said right back, refusing to back down, "we see the strange look on your face every time you cast a difficult spell right. Even Hermione isn't that happy. You're losing your sanity to this. Your peace of mind is evaporating away and you don't even see it."

"What peace of mind, Ron?" Harry snapped, exasperated. "There is no peace of any mind until this war is over, least of all _mine_!"

"Harry, we're your best friends, and we see you pushing yourself closer to the edge every single day, not even two months in, fighting an uphill battle that's going to kill you before you fight the first Death Eater!" Ron paused and put his head on his palm while he dejectedly made a move, almost flinging the piece into place. "You're going to lose yourself to this war, Harry."

"Ron, if we don't fight, no one else will," Harry argued desperately, needing his friend to understand this, if nothing else. "You and Hermione both know the prophecy. No one else can do this. My well-being's value does not equate to the lives of millions. If we don't fight, if _I_ don't fight, _everyone_ is lost to this war." Harry stood, unable to handle anymore of this talk. He reached down and moved his queen.

"Checkmate."

I-I-I-I-I

Late that night as Ron snored serenely a few meters away, Harry could be found sitting on his bed rubbing his forehead in a very agitated manner. He'd had the oddest dream about being locked out of the Burrow while Dumbledore told him that he had no need for friends and promptly morphing into Voldemort, who held up the locket and cackled at him, effectively telling him he'd never find it. For precious seconds after waking Harry had been mortified of the prospect that Voldemort knew of his hunt, but his lack of pain from the scar told him it had only been a dream. He threw the blankets off of himself and reached under his bed to pull out the book that was giving him his most recent source of frequent headaches, but also was what he considered to be the most useful, helpful, and interesting book he owned.

It wasn't that it was boring or mind-numbingly hard to understand, only that it entailed a fair amount of introspection from the reader. One would expect nothing more, he thought wryly, from a book called _The Magical Method. _He grinned as he flipped it to his current page, thinking about its Muggle counterpart, which he had seen Dudley learning about a few years back. The book told how best to perform magic much like _The Scientific Method_ told how to best conduct an experiment. It went over each step and then explained them in detail in subsequent chapters. The more he began to understand the theories, rules and basics behind spellcasting, the easier it was becoming to understand and do the rest of what he was doing with Ron and Hermione. He vaguely wondered why this wasn't what the first-years were learning as he recalled all the times in his years at Hogwarts where this would have been the panacea to all his problems. What he used to understand as wand movement and words in his head or mouth that he could not change or even cast successfully was now changeable and improvisational as he willed it to be. It was as basic as knowing that the foundations had to be put into the ground before the house was built. If he didn't have the need or wish to cast the spell, he couldn't. The incantation was a trigger, not an origin.

The book itself was greatly aged, had pages crinkled in almost every place, and the binding of black leather was severely cracked and had been repaired with magic perhaps a few too many times. It was ripped and old but Harry thanked his lucky stars he had found it the attic with the other books. He was beginning to suspect that the Order hadn't really looked for dark books, but had simply cleared out the library, but it hardly mattered now. He opened it to the page he was reading and found what he would perhaps later say was his favorite part of the book.

_Every witch or wizard who ever lived, is living, or shall ever live has a natural connection to the magic in him or her, and in cases of great aptitude, the magic around them. They are all tuned to magic's natural frequency in the universe, which is received and channeled by those who have a natural receptiveness to it that originates in the blood. This connection varies in strength from person to person and, contrary to popular belief, has nothing to do with blood purity and is completely random, as blood purity effects only the likelihood of producing magical offspring. _

_The intensity of the connection a wizard has to his magic affects every aspect of what he does with magic, from spell power, sensing magical presence and signature, the ability to manipulate certain facets of magic, or even things as trivial as one's magical responses to emotion or the frequency and strength of the accidental magic that commonly occurs during adolescence. Each person has a unique signature that defines him or her, whether it is a strange pattern, a varying frequency, a distinctive color, or all of the above. The connection here is, for example, the key difference between a Muggle and a squib. A squib does indeed have magic, but lacks a connection to it, while a Muggle is completely devoid of any magic at all, explaining, for example, why a squib is able to see Dementors._

_Because magic has a frequency, it is known to leave traces as previously stated, and prolonged exposure does have an effect. It has been said that an object kept close by a wizard eventually becomes tuned to that wizard, absorbs some of his power and attains his signature, or often times is manipulated by it until it begins to reflect some of its owner's magic in a physical manifestation of some sort. This was the reason given for why a significantly aged wizard's wand is typically crooked or shows designs of some sort whereas wands are merely consistent of a shaft and handle when they are originally made._

Harry looked back over at Ron and threw the covers back softly. He slowly rose to his feet, grabbed his wand from the bedside table, and left the room silently. He wandered through the halls slowly, absentmindedly twirling his wand in his fingers as he made his way to through the hallways. The implication of the last paragraph he had read had made him feel slightly off-balance, which was obvious by the almost drunken swagger in his gait as he made his way downstairs. When he finally made it to the kitchen, he searched the cupboards for any kind of alcohol, needing something strong to distract him from completely forming the realization he'd just made with the help of his book. In the last cupboard, he found a half-empty bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, which he grabbed and plunked himself down at the table with.

Many hours later, the bottle now empty and tossed aside, Harry had discovered two things. One was that he couldn't stop himself from getting around to the point he dreaded. The second was that, well, being drunk was a great deal of fun. Try as he might to suppress the fact, and despite the notion's grim reality, he thought about it in his drunken state with apathetic amusement. It was clear that Tom Riddle had bonded his soul with two, perhaps three, extremely powerful artifacts: Slytherin's Locket, the unknown Horcrux, and Hufflepuff's Cup, and he was now probably enjoying the benefits of both or all three. That most likely meant that Voldemort didn't even have to be in contact with either object to enjoy their powers, while any other wizard might have to hold it in their hands to experience the feeling. He thought that perhaps now he understood the red gleam in Tom Riddle's eyes as he held the cup and locket before he had bonded himself to them, and cursed Riddle's misguided fortune in unwittingly, or perhaps not, gaining their power while securing immortality.

He thought it time to return to sleep and pushed himself up from the table, only to stagger sideways and hit the counter with his full weight on his shoulder. He fell down and groaned in pain, deciding he was not going to move anymore. A few minutes later, while Harry was noticing the finer points of the floor, Hermione entered, bundled up and looking highly annoyed at being awake. She spotted him in his position on the floor and growled slightly when she noticed his glazed expression and the empty bottle not feet from him.

"Harry," she chastised sharply, picking up the bottle that contained only dregs.

"'Lo, Hermione," said Harry, blinking a few times as though to clear his head. "How are you? Here, let me refill that for you." He pointed his wand and gave it a funny little flick, which affected a steady refilling of the bottle, at which point Hermione put it down and glared down at him.

"What're you doing, Harry?" she asked, still looking angry.

"Had a rough night," Harry replied while examining his wand. He looked up more clearly at her through his haze and patted the floor next to him. "Come have a seat."

"You're completely smashed," she accused, now looking thoroughly disgusted. "Come on, we've to get you back to bed."

"If you're so mad at me," he said, now vaguely annoyed, "I think I'll just stay here, thanks. You just wait 'til you need Firewhiskey, then you might understand."

"Fine," she said, "see you in the morning." She left the kitchen with a smirk on her face, knowing that he was going to have a bad day ahead of him, right after his horrible night, that is. Harry cursed her later as he prayed to the porcelain god, feeling utterly miserable, having had the misfortune to experience the sensation of the hiccups while having slight alcohol poisoning. Shivering from bodily exertion and humiliating sickness, he found his place on the kitchen floor again and passed out.

Harry woke late the next day, sitting on the kitchen floor with the sun shining in his face and a splitting headache. He put up a hand to shield his face and tried to pick himself up. He groaned loudly at the nausea that swept through him and moaned even louder when he remembered what he'd discovered last night. He should never have even touched Firewhiskey, he thought, irritated. It was entirely too much hassle the day after. He stood stiffly, aching in pain from sleeping in that position, and stumbled back to his room, intent on grabbing clothes so that he could take a shower.

He emerged a half-hour later feeling much better. He now focused clearly on the other part of the revelation he'd had last night, which was choppy and slightly blurred in his memory. He pulled out his wand, which was fairly simple, and reached into the drawer of his bedside to pull out Dumbledore's wand, which he noticed did indeed have strange runes in the wood work, and, while not crooked, it did have a very intricate design. As Harry twirled the smooth wooden shaft in his fingers delicately, he noticed that he felt no outward tingles, or any noticeable signs of magic, but he knew that in no way did that mean what the book had said wasn't true. He had not discerned any noticeable signs of magic on those odd times when he had been walking around Hogwarts and felt strange intuitions or sensations, nor had there been any such thing when he'd had those strangely accurate feelings of being watched around Moody, what with the magical eye and all.

He now knew that magical power was rarely something obvious like tingles or flashes. No, he didn't need swirls or colors to appreciate the power of the wand in his hand; he knew by the subtle feeling of confidence he had when he held it that it was Dumbledore's, for that feeling of subtle confidence was one Dumbledore had often instilled in Harry, and one Harry often sensed Dumbledore carried himself with.

He smiled slightly, knowing that as long as he carried this, as he had been doing, he would be helped, as he had been so many times before, by Dumbledore. What would any wizard give to have this wand and its subtle power, not to use, but just to keep for its bolstering effect? Harry knew it was a combination of both his great feelings for his lost advisor and the magical traces left behind on the object itself, and he valued it now more greatly than ever, for he realized that it held far more than sentimental value within it. He was just putting Dumbledore's wand in his pocket when something hit him like Bludger. He looked out the window to the sun and thought that perhaps he should visit Hogwarts soon.

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**Well, sorry again for the lack of action, but it'll get better very soon. Thanks for reading as always, and a, oh yeah…REVIEW **_**please**_

**Afrojack.**


	5. The Empty Orphanage

**Disclaimer: I own nothing but some of the observations and the plot. J.K. Rowling owns my soul, thus I live to interpret her work feebly.**

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**The Empty Orphanage**

The Order of the Phoenix was at a loss; this was to be the first meeting since the passing of Dumbledore. Alastor Moody was at the front with Arthur Weasley, trying to bring order to the room. The noise in the kitchen at the Burrow had reached a level impenetrable by any voice, but this meeting had to be taken care of. Moody's wand issued a loud _BANG, _and everyone's attention was instantly on him. He began to speak, his eye swiveling eerily in its socket as he began the meeting.

"What are we doing?" he asked the room in general. "What are our plans now? And, most importantly," he growled, "where the bloody hell has Voldemort been for the last year?"

"One would think," spoke Lupin quietly from his shadowy corner, "that the plans would be the same as they were before Albus passed away."

"He would have wanted us to continue," Molly agreed in a shaky voice. "We can't let this stop us, he would've wanted us to keep fighting."

Moody smiled his grotesque, grimace-like smile as he heard these words. "Well then," he grunted, "let's get started."

"Do we have any idea what those plans are?" asked Minerva McGonagall.

"We think that Voldemort has been moving around the country, gathering followers and setting up bases," said Arthur. "He's…building the foundations of his empire, if you will, preparing to take everything. We're currently working tirelessly with the Ministry to guard as many of the places we think he's planning to take. We estimate that he may have a little over six-dozen Death Eaters by now." He looked around the room at large. "It may seem small, but we're stretched for Aurors, and the Order doesn't have that many members. At this point, we're about evenly matched."

"We know he's going to penetrate Hogwarts again, along with the rest of Britain, but that would be after he starts attacking fundamental establishments," Moody growled. "He'll want to be there himself this time to fully conquer it, and I'll be damned if we let him!"

"We can't let him do that," Molly exclaimed, almost hysterical. "Ginny's there!"

"Rest assured that every precaution has been taken, Molly," said McGonagall. "There'll be no more Vanishing Cabinet business!" she said, her nostrils flaring angrily, remembering clearly how foolish she had felt when she had learned the point-of-entrance the Death Eaters had used.

"We can have Aurors stationed _inside_ the castle, and offensive wards on the grounds by the start of term," yelled Moody over the loud din. "Let's get those set up as soon as possible. I don't want a Death Eater to be able to so much as _flick a cigarette_ at the barrier without getting a good zap in the arse!"

There were nods all around as this idea was met with high approval. There were murmurs and whispers as the topic was closed. People were confused, but they were trying the best they could to function without Dumbledore.

"The next order of business," said Arthur, "is there whereabouts of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and my son." The last mentioned had a strangely choked tone to it; it was a mixture of pride and deep concern.

"They have been missing for a little over a month," Moody stated, "said they wouldn't be back until Voldemort was gone." He snorted here as if both impressed and amused simultaneously. "Tonks, check in."

"I looked at the old HQ but there was no one there. It did look cleaner and more lived in than when we left, and there were trunks in some of the bedrooms, but from what I could tell, they're rarely there, at least, they haven't been in the last week."

"Well, folks," growled Moody, "you know what's going on now. I've been to Grimmauld Place personally, and I can tell you now that they probably don't need surveillance to help protect them. One of the most powerful warding jobs I've seen in a long time is on that place. Potter, I suspect." He paused here as though that was something he either expected or was extremely surprised by, but continued quickly. "We're going to station people outside anyway, and send Molly to check on them every once in a while. That's all we have. Meeting adjourned."

The members of the Order left quickly, and all Mrs. Weasley could do was think of her son, and Harry, and Hermione. She sat at the table for hours after the end of the meeting, praying for her children's safety, already looking forward to next week.

- - - - -

Harry stepped out of his bedroom fully dressed and prepared to go back to his parents' house, and he had been meaning to go much earlier, but hadn't gotten around to it with all the other things going on. He suspected he'd be going alone. He didn't want any witnesses to possible breakdowns, he thought with a wry grin to himself. He checked on his two housemates and found them both asleep, but what else could they be this early in the morning? He stepped into the front hall and had just placed his hand on the door when Hermione's voice reached his ears.

"Where are you going?" she asked with no small amount of annoyance in her voice. "Going off alone? Like an idiot?"

"I can take care of myself, Hermione!" he seethed at her, "I'm just going to visit Godric's Hollow."

"I'm coming with you," she asserted. "There's no way you're going out there alone!"

"Fine," Harry relented, "but hurry up! I've got to do this fast."

She returned five minutes later, dressed warmly and smiling at him. She thanked him for letting her come, which Harry thought ironic considering she had been ready to blast him senseless had he refused. They stepped outside together and Hermione looked at him.

"How're we getting there?" she asked, confused.

"I'm going to apparate us to the village," Harry said. "Then we can find the house."

Harry put his hand out for her arm, which she took apprehensively. He assured her that she would be fine and grasped her upper-arm firmly. He twisted them both around rigidly and they disappeared with a tiny _crack!_ They materialized in a small village that had a warm feeling to it, despite the frigid morning weather. It was crowded closely together and had a decidedly cozy atmosphere, which Harry concluded that he liked very much. He looked down the road and saw streets of houses, one of which was undoubtedly his former home. He and Hermione walked into the nearest pub and were greeted by a rather curvy bar-maiden.

" 'Ow can I be of 'elp me dearies?" she asked in a thick accent reminiscent of Hagrid's.

Harry had pulled his hood on before entering and so now could not be easily recognized. He asked in a polite tone, "Where can I find the former Potter residence?"

Her eyes widened and she whispered, "You'll be lookin' to visit the wreck then?" She pointed to the farthest right street and said, "Keep goin' down 'til ya see the dilapidated patch o' property." She told him seriously. "That'll be it. No one can see it, wardin' I suspect."

As they stepped out into the now rapidly brightening village, Hermione turned to Harry and asked, "How'd you find this place? I hadn't thought you'd been here before."

"Remus gave me directions at the wedding," he answered vaguely, "I improvised from there."

They eventually made it to the house. He stood gazing at the broken home just beyond the small front lawn.

"There's nothing here, Harry," said Hermione, looking strangely at what to her was obviously two perfectly fine houses separated by an empty patch of dead grass.

This wasn't a problem that Harry had foreseen in his plans. But now that he thought about it, he figured it impossible for his house not to be under the Fidelius Charm, as it would have undoubtedly become an immediate tourist attraction. He supposed that he would have to inform Hermione of its location if she were going to enter, but Harry thought for a fleeting moment that maybe he should just let her wait outside. He smirked at the idea, but eventually sidled up to her and whispered the address in her ear.

Harry swung the hanging door inwards to his childhood home, Hermione following closely behind him. He stepped over a considerable amount of rubble and gazed at the scorched walls. He slowly made his way to the wall where a cabinet stood, burned badly but still intact. He dragged his fingers over the wall behind it and felt a distinctive presence, a strangely familiar and comforting one. He knew somehow, intrinsically, that this was what was left behind of his mother. Her magical signature lingered on the walls, most likely as a result of her spell-work involving their concealment. He looked back at Hermione, who was watching him closely.

"My mother's magic is still here," he said shakily, "I can feel it."

"It's okay, Harry," Hermione said. "Let's go back to Grimmauld Place. I don't think there's anything left here."

"Not yet," he said looking up the staircase to the right. "There has to be something here."

There wasn't. He searched the house looking in every room. He found his parents' room, which was untouched. The fight had taken place in the entrance hall and his bedroom. When he found his old room, it was clear what had happened. While the _Avada Kedavra_ curse left no physical signs on living beings, it utterly destroyed inanimate objects. He had more or less found out that his house had been a total wreck after Voldemort's attack, and now he saw that that was not a lie. It was also clear that this was indeed the origin of destruction.

The room itself was blasted; the walls were almost completely black, crumbled and broken, just as they were downstairs. The crib in the corner was burnt almost beyond recognition, but the opposite corner was oddly untouched. The walls were still the light, pale peach color they had been before Voldemort had attacked, and Harry could guess that this was where he and his mother had been. There was nothing left here. He had to leave before he really did break down right there, so he turned to Hermione and nodded that it was time to go. They walked out of the house and apparated away, back to Grimmauld Place.

"Thank you, Hermione," he choked out awkwardly, "for coming with me. I don't think I would have handled it very well on my own."

"Not a problem, Harry," she said, smiling warmly at him. "I'll see you later, I'm going back to sleep for a bit."

As he watched her climb the steps back to her room, Harry couldn't quite place what he was feeling. Ron and Hermione were his best friends, his partners in crime, his confidantes, and the two people he would lay his life on the line for, but they were drifting away from each other. It was an odd thing really, to live together and grow apart thusly. It felt to Harry as though Hermione and Ron's relationship was driving him away, although he couldn't place why. They were extraordinarily discreet, which was more than any normal person could request, but the feeling that they were skirting around him for his feelings made him distantly sick. Harry had always prided himself, if on anything, on being courageously apathetic when it came to his friends' relationships. He thought he could take the brunt of most anything, and here his best friends felt he needed to be spared their relationship.

He looked down at his wand and gripped it tightly. He so wished that he had time for the things that normal 17-year-olds did. He couldn't blame it on the mission, for even Ron and Hermione found time for their romances. Of course, he had been working much harder than they had, but it still felt as though there might never be room for his happiness. He gripped his wand still more tightly. He wasn't going to lie down and accept this fate, he swore it to himself. He would make time for his happiness if was the last thing he did.

He heard Hermione climbing the steps above him, and finally heard her door softly click shut in the quiet house, and thought he might do well to sleep. As he entered his and Ron's room, he discovered his best friend to be sleeping like a rock, never having woken at any point during his and Hermione's absence. He climbed into bed and, seeing that it was 6:30, thought that perhaps two more hours of sleep would do him good. He aimed his wand at the slightly open blinds and they shut firm and tight, and he drifted into a dreamless sleep.

- - - - -

The weeks blended together into months in a haze of practice, and research. In the late evening hours of an eerily dark October night, Harry sat drinking tea at the scrubbed wooden table in the kitchen of Number 12, Grimmauld Place. His thoughts were drifting back to their arrival at the house, their settling in and subsequent weeks. Mrs. Weasley had visited often, preparing good, hot meals for them, having a motherly sense that they hadn't really been eating healthily, being a bunch of teenagers living alone in a house together.

Harry was taking a break and enjoying the moment of silence. They always worked in the kitchen, and the evidence was that the table was currently strewn and heaving with papers about Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, and dozens of exhausted sources on what might have been references to Horcruxes. This is not to say that it was all they did. No, they lived like college students and, of course, having refused to study Harry's books with him, Ron and Hermione were reading the seventh year texts thoroughly together. Harry had seen them hunched over tables with their heads close together or touching, holding hands at times and whatnot. Harry himself had already finished two of his books, having relentlessly perused both of them, learning the relevant and useful spells he thought would help. He had, of course, studied many times with his friends, and had certainly looked up possible Horcruxes with them. However, he couldn't help but notice that there was less and less room for him when it came to Ron and Hermione.

It was his third book, _Fire with Fire, _that lay half-open before him now. He had gone through the spells one by one and mastered each one that he'd decided to learn. It had been a long, hard process but it had been worth it. He thought that perhaps in the next week or two he would be ready to hunt down a Horcrux. He pushed his bangs from his eyes and looked back down to his book, thinking that this was rather like the end of his fourth year at Hogwarts, having his core group of spells and a whole host of others for odd situations.

Harry finished his tea and went back to the third and final book he had picked for himself. This one was full of nasty curses and spells that used fire in many different ways. He was exhausted though, and had resigned himself to read the rest of the book later. He rose from the table and made his way to his bed. Before he closed the door to the kitchen he flicked his wand at the table. The teacup flew to the sink and began washing itself while the papers rearranged themselves into neat piles, and the page he had been reading was slowly engulfed by the rest of the book, burying the illustration of a man with a whirlwind of fire around him inside the tattered, stiffening pages of _Fire with Fire_. Tomorrow would be a very tiring day.

- - - - -

The next morning, Harry, Ron and Hermione were sitting around the table when a resounding slapping sound rung through the air.

"I'm an idiot," Harry stated before letting his head drop to the table with a loud thunk.

"What are you talking about?" Hermione asked him, looking concerned when she saw his head smack the table.

"Why are we looking for what these things might be? Does it matter what they are?" he asked, looking at Ron and Hermione, who had dumbfounded expressions on their faces. "Why find out _what_ the bloody things are when we know _where_ they are? All that wasted effort…" He sighed dejectedly and looked around the kitchen. "Where's my Firewhiskey?"

Hermione gave him a very nasty look and huffed at him. "I threw it out. It's detestable and it doesn't belong here. I would have thought you'd learned your lesson. Besides, it's still useful to know what they are, even if we can find them beforehand."

"But we don't know where they are," Ron said. "He's hidden them, hasn't he?"

"Sure we know where they are," said Harry, "that's why I was getting lessons from Dumbledore. I've seen a lot of the most important places he's ever known, and could by now probably guess where he would put them, based on his past."

He got up from the table and paced around the kitchen, thinking of where he might have stored a Horcrux. He reviewed the memories he and Dumbledore had seen and immediately wrote off the Gaunt house, as Dumbledore had already taken care of that location. The next logical step was the orphanage.

Harry could see pros and cons to this. Why would Voldemort store a piece of his soul in a place like an orphanage? The children there had been reasonably well cared for, but Harry couldn't help thinking of the Dursleys'. However, what better place to put a Horcrux than where you found out you were a wizard? That had probably been one of, if not _the_, happiest times of Voldemort's life. It was worth a check, and though Harry tried not to get his hopes up, he was already hopeful and happy that they may have inadvertently found a Horcrux.

"What about the orphanage?" Harry asked his friends, knowing that they recalled his recount of the memory from last year. "That's where Dumbledore told him he was a wizard, wasn't it? There's bound to be something there."

"I don't care," Hermione began hotly, "I'm still going to find out what they are. What if they have some mechanism that blows your head off or something?"

"She has a point, mate," said Ron, rubbing the base of his neck as though he now treasured what sat upon it that much more.

Harry gave him a vaguely disgusted look. "If there was, Voldemort would have probably gotten rid of it when he got it, but I suppose you do have a point," Harry admitted grudgingly. "Let's just go check it out."

They arrived on the street corner across from the orphanage that had housed with two loud cracks. Hermione and Ron gave Harry slightly annoyed looks before the three of them set off towards the crippled building.

Harry and Hermione checked the door for curses and were surprised to find none. This did not bode well; if there were a Horcrux here, surely there would be some sort of ward. Harry figured, however, that as there had been no enchantments on the outer cave, the room Riddle had stayed in was probably where he'd find resistance. He twitched his wand and the door flew inwards and smacked the wall behind it loudly. They walked slowly up the creaky steps, Harry leading, until they reached the corridor outside the room where Riddle had lived.

Outside the old door, Harry checked again and was disappointed by the lack of protections on it. Inside the room was just as Harry remembered it from Dumbledore's pensieve, though he strongly suspected that others had inhabited it since the charming orphan's departure. They searched every nook of the room until Harry came up from under the bed with toys – most likely stolen by Riddle. Apparently, Tom knew the same trick of the loose floorboard Harry had used in Privet Drive.

Harry's knuckles were white around the breaking action-figure that was creaking in his palm under the strain of Harry's grip, and his face was eerily passive, though his eyes were oddly glassy and his pupils were slightly dilated.

He had been so close to a breakthrough. He had been secretly sure that this place had harbored a Horcrux within its dusty, battered walls, yet there had been nothing, just as there had been nothing in Godric's Hollow. He could feel rage and disappointment flooding him, racing through him in a way that made him stifle the primal urge to scream.

"This place is empty," he said. "I got my hopes up for nothing."

"Harry it's – " Hermione stuttered.

Hermione had begun to move closer to him when he held up a hand. He took a step towards the door and motioned them to follow, trying to show them he was fine. They preceded him through the door and turned back questioningly when he did not follow. They saw him reenter the room and they went back to see what he was doing.

Harry was standing tall and upright in the very center of the room with his wand at his side amid gales of broken panes of glass. Every window in the room was shattered, and cuts marred his hands and his left cheek where the shards had hit him. He breathed deeply and disapparated on the spot with a deafening crack that rattled the wooden wardrobe on the far wall and made the broken glass on the floor, and the wooden floorboards themselves, rattle ominously.

- - - - -

The mid autumn Saturday morning was just breaking over Hogwarts' grounds. The rolling lawns glistened with dew, sparkling in the burning sunrise, and shining in a bright and cheery pinkish-yellow that that did not reach to the indigo skies. The many occupants of the grandiose castle were still slumbering deeply, though quite aware that the fiery, bloody war raged just outside the sturdy, black iron gates topped by the winged boars of Hogwarts Castle.

The halls were silent in the morning hours as even Peeves drifted through, not yet causing trouble with no wandering students to heckle. One often found that being a proper, trouble-making Poltergeist was hard to do when there was no tension to feed off of in the sleeping hours.

Minerva McGonagall had just woken. She walked into her spacious circular office and sat down behind the desk. Here in the early half of the semester, she was proud to say that, so far, the school was just fine. Perfect in fact. As she gazed around the office that now held less shiny, whirring objects than in the days of her predecessor, she knew that despite the fair start, the school was still swathed in unrest. No one had forgotten Dumbledore, or his untimely demise. He had been perhaps the greatest headmaster to grace these fabled halls in centuries, and his death, therefore, was that much more terrible. The absence of the Gryffindor Golden Trio helped little. The headmistress had been banking on Potter's return to bolster the students, and had been disappointed when he didn't show up. In the absence of her Head Boy and Girl, she had been forced to choose Ernie Macmillan and Padma Patil, who did an admirable job to say the least.

Professor McGonagall looked out over the grounds she knew so well and again noted Harry Potter's absence as her level gaze fell across the large Quidditch stadium. She was severely startled, however, when her watch passed over the gates. As she had been looking at them, a small figure that was indistinguishable had appeared right in front of the gates out of thin air.

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**Okay, some more character development, and for those who might be wondering, Voldemort will be arriving soon, so don't give up on me yet. Thanks for reading,**

**Afrojack.**


	6. The Gilded Frame

**Sorry for the long wait. Been Busy with many things lately, but here it is. I doubt very many people are reading this anyways, seeing as I have a grand total of 720 views and 7 reviews, but that's not what I'm writing this for, and for those that are reading, thanks a lot.**

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**The Gilded Frame**

The halls of Hogwarts really were quiet early in the morning thought Harry as he strode behind McGonagall towards her office. She'd come down to the gates even before he'd sent his Patronus to her window, apparently having seen him arrive. He had smiled broadly when she looked slightly _up_ at him through her square spectacles.

Her high-heeled witches boots echoed against the walls loudly and clearly in the vacant hallway while Harry continued silently behind, trying to prepare himself mentally for his upcoming meeting. McGonagall had known, even without asking, what he was here for. He could read it in the understanding expression on her face.

"Very good disguise, Potter," she remarked absentmindedly as they walked along. "I wouldn't have been able to tell it was you had your eyes not been the same as they always were. I'd recognize those a mile away." She smiled at him and Harry surmised that maybe she wasn't so strict in the mornings, or maybe it was because he was no longer a student.

"Yeah," he remarked in an annoyed but slightly amused tone. "I had to figure out that my eyes are stubbornly resistant to transfiguration the hard way."

They kept up the conversation as they walked, and before he realized it, they were at the Gargoyle, and then they were riding the spiral staircase up to the Headmistress's office. "I'll just leave you to it then," she said briskly, the previous sense of friendliness forgotten among the tension that permeated Harry's presence. "I'll be back shortly."

As Harry gazed around the office and dispelled his disguise, his eyes stopped inevitably on the portrait he'd been looking most forward to seeing. Dumbledore, rather than pretending to be asleep like the other portraits that lined the walls, was looking serenely at him from behind his half-moon spectacles.

"Hello, Harry," he said, smiling benignly from his gilded frame, hands crossed neatly on his lap as he sat in one of famous purple chintz chairs. "I see you've finally come to visit this old man in his old, roomy office."

"Pro-professor Dumbledore," Harry stuttered, having known that this was coming but still having been totally unprepared. "Is it really –?"

"No, my dear boy, it is not," Dumbledore spoke softly. "I suspect that I am somewhere enjoying myself, perhaps on a beach, or sailing serenely beyond the realms of human struggles and realities." He smiled indulgently and winked at Harry. "No, Harry, this is me as you knew me when I passed on, and I'm rather sure that we have many things to discuss."

Harry was still speechless. He had so many questions to ask, so many things to say, but alas, he knew that this was no substitute. This was not Dumbledore, but a recreation of his character. However, now that he stood here, poised to ask questions, he did not know in the slightest where to start.

"How has the school been?" asked Harry, who had been missing the closest thing to a home he'd ever had more and more since his decision not to return to it this year.

"The year has been progressing smoothly," said Dumbledore, smiling at him. "Though as I'm quite sure Minerva noticed, the halls seem empty without you in them. It always seemed to me that old Hogwarts appreciated a student who appreciated her as the home she is."

Harry was still trying to wrap his mind around the idea of Hogwarts being a sentient being, much less with a distinction as fine as being a female one, when Dumbledore spoke again.

"I trust that you received your inheritance?" he asked, looking over his half-moon spectacles at Harry.

"Yes," said Harry, quickly recounting the different items in his mind. "The Pensieve, the memories from last term, and your wand. Why your wand, sir?"

"Well, first off, Harry, I'd be greatly disappointed if you wrote off all the memories as the ones we viewed last year, for while they are certainly among that collection, there are also a great many other memories I've included for you to learn from. That box contains a great deal more than last year's memories and my wand."

This astounded Harry. He couldn't believe his own stupidity sometimes. There had been other memories there, and they had probably included spells, ancient magicks, and all sorts of other things to help him, and he hadn't even touched them yet. It amazed him how some things still had to be shoved under his nose by Dumbledore for him to recognize.

"Secondly," Dumbledore continued with a hint of amusement present behind his ice-blue eyes, "I, for one, think it would be a grievous shame for a wand such as mine, if you'll excuse my pomposity, to be snapped in two. Lastly, as that wand has been bonding with my magic for somewhere 'round a century and a half, it does indeed become, in and of itself, a powerful magical object, whose power supplements your own, should you choose to carry it. By the look on your face, you've already realized that. Good observation, Harry. You have just started and already you are making leaps and bounds."

"We haven't even found a Horcrux yet, Headmaster!" Harry complained disparately. "How is that good progress?"

"It took me years to find the Horcruxes dear boy," said Dumbledore looking down at him worriedly. "I'm sure you'll find them in much better time with the information I have given you. But I can tell that you took my letter to heart. I can see by the way you carry yourself that you have dedicated yourself to becoming better, and are doing so quickly. I do believe we have a chance to win this war."

Harry couldn't help scoffing in disbelief. "If I was the wizarding world I'd be packing my things and moving to America. How are they supposed to look at me with confidence? I'm nobody. They're right to be terrified, they have every reason to be worried that they may not live to see the other side of the war."

"They would be foolish to be worried, Harry. They have you, and whether you realize it or not, no one else is better suited than you for this. I was not lying when I said that Voldemort had handpicked his deadliest enemy. You are his equal in any natural way. It is only experience and utter ruthlessness that he has over you, but you have a power that he doesn't."

"I'm not his worst enemy," said Harry sarcastically, with a heavy overtone of dejection. "My luck is."

"Your luck has never been what has won the battles between you and Tom. It only evened the playing field, and to escape in those situations, no matter how much luck was involved, is an incredible feat for any wizard. Not to mention the fact that he has over fifty years of experience more than you. No, Harry, what won those battles has always been you. Having potential and using it to its fullest are two completely different things. In all your battles you have forgotten that the gifts you received required the intelligence and presence of mind to use them. If you hadn't had those, you'd still have died those nights.

"I have said it before. One day you will understand just how exceptional you are. It is strange really, how alike you and Tom are. Similar childhoods but completely different results. Do you know why that is?

"No," Harry said, completely nonplussed, not seeing were this line of questioning would take him, but now that he considered it, they had had very similar childhoods. Though he doubted Tom Riddle lived in a cupboard for the first decade of his life, he thought bitterly.

"It is because your personalities have, despite many shared traits, integral differences. He let his grim upbringing mold him into a bitter, cold young man, obsessed with power and personified by greed, whereas you, despite inhuman treatment and conditions at the hands of your relatives, took full responsibility for your situation and rose above it, did things and faced more horrors than any man should, and you did it without losing yourself."

"What?" asked Harry angrily. "How do you figure I was responsible for any of that? I had no choice!"

"You will find," said Dumbledore, talking over Harry, "that one most always has a choice. You did not let your relatives and trials defeat you, Harry. You could not have changed your situation, but had full responsibility to how you reacted to it. You did not crumble, but responded to your situations with courage; ready to play with the hand life had so cruelly dealt you, ready to fight to the death. That, my boy, is responsibility; taking the burden of your actions and situations and moving on. Do you know how many other children raised such as you would have serious problems, or turned out as a sociopath, just like Voldemort? Solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments we can impose on each other for a reason, Harry. "

This, thought Harry, was a Dumbledore that he had never witnessed. Dumbledore was always the one who gave everyone a second chance, the one who understood, who loved, yet here he was, speaking with a kind of dislike that Harry had never heard from him. It was as though the kind of character that Voldemort embodied utterly disgusted his former headmaster.

Something had happened long ago to wipe away Dumbledore's sympathy for those who had no will or were too weak to overcome their past. While he was disgusted with Tom for utterly failing not to turn to the dark, to become the obsessed maniac he was, he had a kind of stiff pride in his eyes as he looked at Harry. It was as though he were proud of Harry for coming through his years at Hogwarts and with the Dursleys' as he had.

"Harry, you are good at remembering that you fight for everyone else, but forget that above all else, you are fighting for yourself. You are defending your own right to life before anyone else's. You want to save everyone, Harry, but more than anything, you want to _live. _I can see it in your eyes even now. But it is not the malignant fear that you see in Voldemort. It is the will and right to live, the _need_ to live if only for the things that you were deprived of for so long. There is the difference between you and Riddle.

"Tom wanted only power, and that pursuit of power for power's sake made death his worst enemy, his only fear. That fear was like a disease, Harry. It consumed his soul and drove him to unspeakable feats of evil. You have both already made your choices. As you so aptly concluded in your thoughts last year, he chose to let himself be dragged into the arena kicking and screaming against a fate we all share for fear of succumbing to the same weakness his mother had, while you chose to hold your head up high and walk into that arena like _your _mother, facing your own premature death, born to fight, destined to win!

"It is ironic, that Tom sacrificed his soul for immortality, because in doing so, he made sure that he wouldn't achieve it. Equally ironic is that in your acceptance of death on the night you went to the Department of Mysteries, you discovered the power that will be the driving force behind his demise."

"Love, right?" Harry asked, failing miserably to mask the skepticism in his voice.

Dumbledore's expression was quite calm, though the stern edge in his voice was equally chilling when he answered. "I have watched you from the very beginning, Harry, and I have seen countless times how you rise to any challenge, no matter how impossible, time and time again when something you love is threatened. That is your power, Harry.

"Love is not hugs and kisses, Harry. Love is the most basic, raw acts of selflessness that you so often exhibit. It is the readiness to lay your life down for your friends. You so clearly are an example of someone who has done that, and is still willing to do so for others. Your greatest power is love in that you are not afraid to give everything of yourself or die for what you believe is right, and neither are your friends. The night you vowed to give everything you are to this fight, the night you vowed to win, you became the most powerful man in the universe." Seeing Harry's confused look, he pressed onwards.

"You have great magical talent, Harry. The Sorting Hat saw that the night it sorted you, but that's not what's going to ultimately win this. The most important thing is not that you have as much magical potential as Voldemort, but that you are willing to use it all to defeat him for the sake of those you love, even if you_ die._ Those who are most determined to win, or to obtain true power, will do so. That is what I was saying in the letter I wrote to you before my death."

Harry thought that definitely made sense. He had talent, but so did Voldemort. His advantage was that not only did he have talent, but that he would sacrifice every last drop of it to rid the world of the Dark Lord. There was no denying the fact that no one was more determined to win than he was. Dumbledore interrupted his musings by continuing.

"There is little reason for you to be scared Harry. Voldemort's knowledge of magic is vast, more so than perhaps anyone else's, but there is hope! For all the magic he knows, he continuously fails to know_ you_. The most important rule of war is to know thine enemy, and Voldemort does not know you, but you know him perhaps better than he knows himself. That is a weapon of immense power. Use it well!

"But do not grow complacent. The reason he has lost so many times is because he underestimates _you_. His knowledge _is_ vast, and his cruelty unmatched. It won't be any easier now than it was before, the only difference is that now you _know_ that you are equal to him. Take this, if nothing else I've said to you, seriously.

"NEVER underestimate Tom Riddle. It is a mistake you may not live to regret." With those last warning words, he nodded to Harry and exited his frame, his eyes lacking the trademark twinkle, his face looking like he had never heard truer words come from his own mouth. He had given all that he could to Harry, the rest of the way was his to find.

Harry turned from the empty portrait with a different feeling than the one he had entered with. Dumbledore had always had a way of putting the bleakest situations into new perspective, and this time was no different. He still had a smile on his face when he heard the heavy oaken doors open and then the light, measured steps of McGonagall behind him. He turned towards her to say his goodbyes.

"Thank you professor," he said sincerely. "For letting me see him. It helped a lot. Good luck. Hopefully I won't see you until this ends." He took one last look around the office and back at the empty frame. "Goodbye Headmistress."

As the door shut behind him, Professor McGonagall could only look on. Many moments later she whispered: "Good luck, Harry."

- - - - -

The halls were still empty for the most part, but now Harry could hear the faint stirrings of activity from the Great Hall. He found it a strange contrast to that most horrible day in his fifth year. Just as then, he had had a serious conversation with Dumbledore, though now rather than bad news, his mentor offered him strong words of encouragement and advice. But now, he thought, the starkest contrast lay where he thought before he might not have noticed it. That awful morning, he had suffered inhuman pain on every level, and to hear his peers and colleagues waking up for their breakfast on the otherwise beautiful morning had been like salt on his festering wounds. Who, he had asked himself, deserved such happiness on that morning? Such blissful normality? Who, when he himself would never have that again? But now as he walked through the halls he knew so well, he treasured those early morning murmurs.

They showed that happiness in normality still existed. They showed that under terror people and the lives they led still went on. No, he would never have that, but now he realized that he neither needed, nor ever really wanted it. His life had never been normal, nor would it ever be, but he was not alone. Was Dumbledore's life ever normal? Voldemort's? Any great man in history, wizard or Muggle? No. The weight of his burden was in the absence of the things he himself fought for. But knowing that he might one day make it possible for those simple things to exist, for his friends, for his family, lessened that weight just a little. It still hurt that he had never known the peace of mind that his friends enjoyed, but perhaps he might find it somewhere in the end of all this…

He passed few other students on the way to his destination. Of course it felt like an endless crowd of people what with their constant gawking and pointing. He supposed that he had been virtually invisible for the past four or five months, but this was ridiculous. What he didn't realize was just how intimidating he looked now. His glasses' silver frames glinted near his already vivid eyes, and months of hard work and little sleep showed in his tired expression, the knowing look in his eyes, the quiet confidence in his stride, and the shaggy, even longer, black hair shadowing his face. He smirked at the fact that the whispering was no longer present. He was glad that he inspired silence if not courtesy. He stopped in front of the place he had been heading for and knocked lightly.

The door swung wide to reveal the mustached face of Horace Slughorn, which quickly paled and was almost immediately blocked again by the rapidly closing door. Harry stopped its progress with his hand and stepped though the small space and turned to face his old professor with a smile in place. Slughorn looked utterly terrified.

"Hello, Professor Slughorn," he greeted as he flicked his wand to shut the door with a crisp snap. "I was wondering what you know about Horcruxes."

* * *

**There you have it. That was the last of Dumbledore. We won't be seeing him for a long while, and what better way to send him off then with he pep-talk of all pep-talks, eh?****I thought I'd show some good character growth with the contrast to OotP, as I myself am tired of reading Harry in the same preteen mindset that most authors cast him in. The pre-written material is now gone, and things in the story are going to start picking up very quickly. Important things coming soon, thanks again for reading,**

**  
Afrojack**


	7. The Twisted Mausoleum

**The Twisted Mausoleum**

_"We discussed many things this past year" said Dumbledore. "We talked about Riddle's past, his motivations, his ambitions, and most especially his Horcruxes. We laid a very important foundation for your quest, but sadly we never got to the details."_

"_But," he laughed, " I am glad that we got the important things done first. Now we may move on to those very important details that will let you put that foundation to use." He plopped into his desk chair and smiled benignly at him. _

"_I am going to first teach you," he said, "how to bypass the defenses of Voldemort's Horcruxes. I'm going to make sure that you never make the same mistake I made…"_

- - - - -

"…And that's why I say that Frank is innocent to this damn day, God rest his soul!" yelled a regular of the Hanged Man, slamming his meaty fist into the table in his righteous anger, and then for more of his dark ale.

Indeed, despite the fact that the death of said man was almost three years ago, he was still talked about every once in a while, though the story had been told so many times that its popularity had started to wane.

"Whatever you say Jim," laughed the good-natured proprietor of the pub as she took empty glasses from a nearby table to the back. She'd known Jim since the day she'd opened this old pub, more than fifty years back as a matter a fact. She still remembered the fiftieth anniversary celebration just about two years before old Frank had died.

The spacious room was just as she'd left it when she returned from the kitchen. The boisterous, drunken atmosphere of a busy night still permeated the dim room as joyous talk and friendly debates filled the air.

It was at times like these that she felt the most content, looking out over the crowded tables with a small smile on her plump face. But this night would prove to be another strange one for the town in just a few short years. This place rarely ever had any excitement, but when it did it was always so strange, almost…haunted. Which was why a distinctly suspicious silence fell over the pub when a sound that was something like a firecracker, except louder, was heard outside.

"Oh dear…" Martha said. She slowly made to start towards the door, but was saved the trouble when it opened and a tall, hooded figure stepped in. His footsteps made heavy creaking noises as he stepped across the room while conversation steadily restored itself after the awkward silence that accompanied his entrance.

The thin man reached the bar and seated himself. He turned on his stool until he was facing Martha, who was by now back behind the bar, still regarding her new guest with a keen eye.

"What'll it be, love?" she asked in a friendly tone. She couldn't have been more surprised by his answer.

"Whiskey, if you have it," said a voice that couldn't be older than his late teens. He pulled back his hood to reveal an equally young, though tired, face with round spectacles in front of possibly the most unnaturally green eyes she'd ever seen. His expression was so world-weary that she was tempted to give him the drink, but no matter his height or assumed experience, the fact remained that he looked barely seventeen, and she wasn't in the business of selling to minors.

"You look a little wet behind the ears, young man," she said with a raised brow and an amused smirk. "Got any I.D.?"

The teen reached into his cloak, which, in and of itself was strange, as she'd only ever seen a very sparse few enter this place with cloaks like that ever before.

"That should do," he said in a friendly voice as he shoved a completely blank, card-sized piece of paper across the scrubbed wooden panel of bar. She was slightly confused at first, but she knew as soon as she picked up the card that this young man was most definitely of age.

The sitting man smiled a little when her eyes glazed over in compliance, but immediately frowned when a slightly apologetic look took over her features.

"My apologies, dear, but we're all out of whiskey, anything else I can do yeh for?" She didn't even notice when her customer sighed in relief, and she promptly scuttled to the shelves in the back when he ordered mead instead.

"Have a drink with me," the young man said, holding up his mug of mead. "I could use the company." She looked back at him, seeing that he did look incredibly lonely. She poured herself a glass of something or other and sat down across from him and asked where he was from.

"Well," he began with a thoughtful tone, "you could say I was raised in a not-so-upstanding orphanage with a few other kids, some of whom were especially unsavory," he said with some amusement. "I was there till I was 11, and then, you see, I got accepted to a boarding school up in Scotland…"

The conversation continued for a long time. He eventually asked her about her origins, in answer to which she extended her arms outwards with a proud smile, indicating that she'd been there her whole life. He learned of the bizarre things that had happened there, and of the reactions that followed.

"Strange things about that old Riddle house, I tell yeh," she slurred after a few glasses. "No one ever figured out what was behind the two accidents that happened there."

"Strange indeed…oh, I best be on my way," said the man in a kind voice as he stood up slowly. "Thank you for your information."

"My wha –?" she started, but never finished. The young stranger had drawn a thin, sturdy-looking stick from his belt loops, flicked it, and walked away, never to enter again. All poor Martha could do was wonder why the young man would bother to enter at all if all he was going to do was immediately leave. She shrugged and sat back down as though nothing had happened at all, wondering why in the world she felt so tipsy.

- - - - -

"The Horcrux is, at its core, is only ever a fragment of a soul," said Slughorn, pacing the office again. "And when defending itself, it will do as perhaps any soul would, and try and destroy yours to protect itself."

He paced some more and then stopped. "It will be the second to last phase of the process, and undeniably the most difficult. It will test you on every level, and when it is done…well," he paused and looked up with a challenging smile in place, "then I guess you'll just have to thank your lucky stars that you're alive at all."

- - - - -

Harry couldn't have been more pleased at his success as he hiked his way up the steep hill towards the Riddle Manor. He definitely had enough to know that this was where Tom had murdered his father. It was only his second lead, but this place, in his mind, was almost a guaranteed Horcrux spot. Now he just had to figure out where on this property it was hidden. He had his hand on the back door ready to enter the house when he thought he sensed it. The corner of the back garden stood out, but only so slightly that someone who perhaps wasn't looking for it would have completely passed it.

He knelt down and carefully examined the dirt on the ground, stopping at the patch that seemed more freshly dug than the hard dirt just under his feet. He closed his eyes and let his fingers find it. He had heard that when someone's eyes were closed, their other senses sharpened, and apparently magic was no different. Without his eyes to distract him, Harry found exactly what he was looking for. He felt his fingers wrap around a cold handle and he sharply yanked, but only a tremble resulted.

Harry stood up and took a step back, pointing his wand outward. He waved his wand in a quick circle, watching as the dirt dispersed. He smiled, pointed his wand at the small trap door, and flicked it upward. The trap door flew open as though something had exploded under it and thudded loudly on the other side of its hinges, dust rising slowly from where it had landed.

Harry stepped to the edge and peered down into the opening, but saw only chipped, crumbling, stone steps descending into the blackness awaiting him, almost as though inviting him to fall into it. He lit his wand and slowly made his way down the steps until he reached the bottom. As soon he had descended the last step, he heard the trap door slam closed above him, the sound echoing ominously off the walls inside the now dark chamber, lit only by his relatively weak wand light. Harry twirled the tip of his wand in a circle and the tip flared into a blinding light, which Harry shielded his eyes from and held up, splashing the stark light against the stone walls of a very small room.

There were many shelves lining the far wall, filled with rotting food and jars full with what looked like molding preservatives. Against the other wall Harry's wand light fell on what he could only describe as a twisted mockery of some sort of tomb. A two-shelved wooden cabinet with an entirely glasswork front stood out amongst the other admittedly mundane things in this cellar, showing two yellowing skeletons with decaying flesh and ligaments still attached.

"I think I'm gonna be sick." Harry muttered to himself, marveling at the sadistic nature of his foe.

Harry, aided by the sense he had been slowly honing, placed his hands on the walls and unfocused his eyes, waiting for something that stood out among the blurry mess that the room had become, all the while trying to ignore the rotting corpses not two feet from him. He found what he was looking for when he felt a deep depression in the wall that his wand light had so conveniently failed to reveal.

He could only wonder what that depression was for, that is, until his gaze was drawn back to the skeletons in the corner. He stepped in front of the cabinet and opened the glass door. He reached for the skull of the skeleton on the bottom shelf, which was short, and seemingly weak, as though the man had been frail in life.

Harry wagered that he knew who this was. So overly dramatic was Tom Riddle, that he had placed the Horcrux made from his father's murder in Gaunt's shack, while Gaunt's skeleton and presumably the Horcrux modeled from his murder might lay here in his Muggle father's home. He had aimed to disgrace both hated ancestors in death. He put that thought aside and reached for the bones before him.

He reached for the head, yanking it roughly off of the rest of the spinal column. He turned and thrust it into the wall, smiling when a thunderous click sounded from behind the wall. The cabinet slid backwards and to the side, gradually revealing an unnaturally dark tunnel. Harry thrust his lit wand forward into the tunnel but was greeted with only a few feet of illuminated path. He moved his wand to the sides and saw that the walls were lined with stone snake heads in which the bottom jaws had been replaced with torches. The bright blue gems that sparkled in the eye sockets twinkled mischievously at him.

"There are torches," Harry concluded slowly, "He put them there for a reason. Guess I have to use them."

Harry waved his wand towards the torches but nothing happened. He frowned, and intoned the spell with as much authority in his voice as he could muster, and yet still nothing happened. He thought for a few minutes, mulling it over, then whispered "_**Incendio" **_in parsletongue and all of the torches in the hallway lit simultaneously, bathing it in an ethereal blue light. He crept down the tunnel, following the torches down a seemingly endless path, avoiding touching the walls until he reached a circular chamber. There, in the middle, was possibly the largest raven statue Harry had ever seen, perched on a raised pedestal, clutching a jawless skull in its obsidian beak.

"Ravenclaw," Harry whispered, examining the skull, and noticing that it had been petrified by magic, obviously for preservation reasons.

Harry approached it, looking at the walls for signs of traps. From what he could see, the stone-gray skull had a complicated rune on the forehead, etched crudely by what looked to be a knife. He could feel it pulsing with malevolence from where he stood. He took a moment to chuckle at Voldemort's apparent skull phase.

Times like this he really wished he had Ron and Hermione with him. He hadn't spoken to them since the incident at the orphanage and they were probably worried sick. Harry had come here with something to prove, and now that he was about to embark on the hardest part of this journey, he wished he hadn't been so stubborn. But deep down, he knew that if he couldn't even defeat a Horcrux by himself, he had no chance against Voldemort at all.

"_Inimicus Cum Intentum Déstrūgere Repulse," _he muttered repeatedly, moving in a slow circle around the area he was about to occupy, knowing he would need to impede whatever "guardians" this place might have while he worked. They'd have a tough time getting through this one, he thought to himself, proud of all the things he'd learned to help him. He cleared his head and with a step forward, seized the head by the back and yanked hard. Harry pulled out his wand as the skull became dislodged. He gripped it tightly in both hands and focused on the presence he could feel emanating from within it. Now came the hard part.

"_EXPELLESAWOL!"_ he yelled, the arcane and chaotic nature and incredible power of the spell distorting his voice. The skull cracked with a sound like a gunshot, the rune on its forehead flashing a dark, sickly purple. He looked down and the skull's empty sockets met his eyes. Everything else faded away.

Harry was once again back under Hogwarts, facing off with Quirrell, the pain in his head mounting and the exhaustion creeping up on him as he battled Voldemort's feeble-minded host. Suddenly the scene whipped itself with a blur of colors into the Chamber of Secrets and the Basilisk fang was once more sinking deep into the flesh of his arm. It was like Legilimency, except this was so, so much worse. Every pain he had experienced in those memories was happening again, just as real as the first time around. Each time he had faced a Dementor and their effects, and he felt them one thousand-fold as each time added to the next.

He distantly heard himself scream out in anguish and severe pain. He was at the graveyard once more, feeling Voldemort's Crucio each time he cast it, the pain in his scar doubling again and again. Perhaps most painfully of all he had to experience the agony of possession a second time, as the presence of Voldemort consumed him yet again.

A voice in the back of his mind spoke, cutting through the fog like a razor. _'Get up! I will not let the bones of a dead witch bring me to my knees!' _He recognized the voice from his fourth-year Imperius resistance lessons, though now it sounded vaguely like someone he couldn't place. '_Get up and fight! This is my mind and it is mine to control. _He felt himself being pulled into more memories of pain and sorrow, but the last words of his inner voice had revealed a truth to him. This was_ his _mind, and no one could invade it _if he did not let them._

Harry came to with a strangled, choking gasp, greatly weakened and grievously injured but brimming with an unknown energy. As he broke away from the Horcrux's delusion, and the skull crumbled into dust slowly, the remains falling into a pile at his feet, an unearthly scream echoing in his own subconscious. He looked up to find the Inferi approaching him with the realization that the Horcrux was in trouble, just as they had done at the Cave.

He staggered to his feet and stepped up to the corpses that were steadily gaining on him. He twirled his wand above his head twice as though it were a lasso and pointed at the oncoming abominations. Fire streamed out of his wand in a powerful spiral that made his wand vibrate with such intense heat that it surprised even Harry as the spell engulfed the corpses in a whirlwind of bright green flame. Harry kept his pyromaniacal attack going as he shook with the effort of the spell on top of his injuries as they persisted in coming closer. And, as the last, badly burnt, dead body was feet from him, it too fell rapidly away to ashes. He had known Felfire would come in handy…

Harry fell to his knees, bleeding and traumatized, but this was far from over. He began to hobble back towards the entrance, but as he reached the middle of the narrow entrance tunnel, the blue flames lining the walls left their torches and blocked the door with a wall of fire. He held up his wand and used the water spell, but the torrent of water had no effect on the flames, which were so hot that the liquid evaporated before it touched them. Harry would have smirked had he not been so injured. This was going to take one powerful Freezing charm. Harry waved his wand in continuous circles, focusing hard until, at last, the flames began to turn into ice, before Harry lashed out with a _Reducto_ that shattered it and walked out.

Harry smiled and turned back towards the tunnel, and then his face fell in absolute horror. A speeding jet of fire the size of a small train was rocketing towards him, gaining fast as though it wanted nothing better than to incinerate him. Harry understood why it had happened. Just like he had needed to use the water in the lake to help Dumbledore and consequently face the monsters the water wrought forth, he had had to extinguish the fire that blocked the door and consequently face the inferno that was on its way to fry him now. Harry knew that anyone other than Voldemort was meant to be burned to a crisp just outside the tunnel so that if and when he found them, Voldemort could smile cruelly as he put the Horcrux back, assuming they hadn't destroyed it yet, and fix whatever problem had let them even get that far.

As the fireball drew ever nearer, the only viable option made itself known to Harry, but it wasn't pretty, nor would it be even remotely within the realms of anything but a supreme effort, but then again, he'd defied the odds before. With only a few seconds left, Harry knew that timing was crucial at that moment. He raised his wand and waited, back straight, ready to die. At the last second, he acted.

At the last possible moment, he acted swiftly, roaring "_DIFFRACTUM!"_ He watched in numb relief as the conflagration reached him and _bent_ outwards and around him. It reformed around the other side of his shield and crashed into the wall behind him, but not before the sheer force of the magic behind the fireball broke his wand arm, or before the strain on his magic from deflecting said force made him vomit. The cabinet slid back into place and Harry laughed. He laughed for the longest time he could ever remember, partly with relief, and partly with victory. He had proven his mettle.

He staggered to his feet and focused the last of his magic into the trip home, and twisted sharply into the welcoming oblivion.

- - - - -

Ron and Hermione were sitting at the kitchen table when the thump up in the entrance hall startled them out of the stupor that Harry had left behind him in the wake of their failure at the orphanage. Hermione screamed when they came upon the unconscious, nearly dead, and disfigured form of one Harry Potter.

"How in the bloody hell did he manage to apparate here like _this_?" asked Hermione in a choked voice, flowing with guilt.

"That hardly matters," Ron said hurriedly, "Get a healer, _now_!"

- - - - -

Harry woke a day and a half later feeling as though he'd been run over by a rampaging giant. He sat up stiffly and noticed the bandages around the elbow area of his right arm, the large bandage on his forehead where his scar was, and what looked like a large cinderblock of chocolate resting on his bedside table with significant chunks missing.

He unwrapped the bandages on his arm and saw the scar where the old wounds had reopened had healed and so discarded the used cloth. He reached up and took the large patch-like bandage off of his scar and felt it. It felt as normal as it ever did though when he glanced at the inside of it the bandage he saw a lightning bolt shaped blood stain and raised his eyebrows in surprise. That Horcrux and his subsequent magic use had done a good number on him. He felt right now as though he could shout a first-year spell and get no results, all of his magic having gone to the healing process. He stretched his sore limbs and scratched his head, very hungry. He threw off his covers, dressed, and left the room heading for the kitchen. As he entered, Ron, Hermione, and Madam Pomfrey looked up at him. His friends smiled but the over-protective nurse glared at him.

"What," she began angrily, "are you doing out of bed, Mr. Potter?"

"Eating," he said simply, and sat at the table and pulled a box of cereal towards him.

"We'll see about that," Madam Pomfrey said as she moved over to him and started to check him over. "Well you seem fine, seeing as they were far easier to heal the second time around," she said giving him what he could have sworn was a secretive smile, "Rest, Mr. Potter, you should be back to full health in about a week."

She left the kitchen to return to Hogwarts and Harry sighed into his cereal, having known the nurse's antics for too long. He looked up at his friends, who were looking back at him with inscrutable looks on their faces.

"What?" Harry asked, looking confusedly between the two of them. If he thought recriminations were coming for having not brought them along, he was sorely mistaken.

They looked at him a moment longer before their faces broke into huge grins. "We destroyed a Horcrux!" Hermione exclaimed with a bright smile on her slightly flushed face. "Though it's a shame that it had to be something so closely linked to Ravenclaw," she said in a sad tone.

"It was her head, Hermione," Ron clarified, "Doesn't get much more closely linked than that."

Harry said nothing as his friends argued about whatever they usually argued about while he finished his cereal. Harry's mood was sky high at the moment. He, or "They" as Hermione would have it, had tracked down a Horcrux and destroyed it without lasting injury, and now they could start on the two definite items they knew to be Horcruxes. They spent the rest of the day relaxing and reveling in their small victory, treasuring the times like these that were becoming fewer and further between these days.


End file.
